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Ballad of Dogs' Beach (in original Portuguese Balada da Praia dos Cães) is a fiction novel by the Portuguese author José Cardoso Pires, relating the investigation into the murder of a political dissident, taking place around one month later by 1961.
- José Cardoso Pires
- 1982
Mar 12, 1987 · Ballad of dog beach: Directed by José Fonseca e Costa. With Assumpta Serna, Raul Solnado, Patrick Bauchau, Sergi Mateu. In Portugal, in the 60s, the corpse of a man appears on Dog's Beach.
- (230)
- Crime, Drama, Mystery
- José Fonseca e Costa
- 1987-03-12
In Portugal, in the early '60s, the corpse of a man brutally murdered appears on Praia dos Cães (Dog's Beach). The corpse is identified as the major Dantas, a man wanted by authorities after his escape from a military prison where he was awaiting trial for insurrection.
Ballad Of Dogs' Beach by José Cardoso Pires - The 8243rd greatest book of all time. The book is a gripping narrative that delves into the political and social turmoil of Portugal during the 1960s, as seen through the lens of a mysterious crime.
- Events in History at The Time The Novel Takes Place
- The Novel in Focus
- Events in History at The Time The Novel Was Written
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From the microcosm to the macrocosm
Ballad of Dogs’ Beach fictionalizes real events that occurred in late 1959 and in 1960. To be more precise, the work is inspired by the 1960 politicalmurder of captain Almeida Santos, an individual who had been implicated a few months before in an abortive military coup against the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. In the novel, the name of captain Almeida Santos has been changed to that of major Luis Dantas Castro. Major Castro is killed by his companions, Filomena or Mena...
António de Oliveira Salazar, dictator of Portugal
A late 1950s and early 1960s travel poster in English from TAP (better known nowadays as Air Portugal), created to attract tourists to Portugal, used the following slogan: “Portugal, Europe’s best-kept secret. Fly TAP.” In a sense, such a slogan was emblematic of the Portuguese society of that era. Closed to foreign influences, the society was controlled and repressed by several paramilitary associations as well as the secret police. At the helm was an austere, tough-minded dictator, António...
The overseas empire
Salazar governed with a heavy hand, surrounding himself with many paramilitary organizations and other associations that controlled all aspects of Portuguese life and, in the process, denied basic freedoms to most citizens in the country. On the surface, the country seemed to run smoothly without dissent; tightly controlled, the press did not report internal friction. Yet there was plenty of turmoil in Portugal, especially during the 1950s and early ’60s when the mythic image of Salazar as sa...
Plot summary
Ballad of Dogs’ Beachbegins with a medical report of an unknown man’s body found by a scavenger dog in the sand dunes of Praia do Mastro, approximately 100 meters from the road, on April 3, 1960. Most of the report focuses on the state of the male body and the extensive damage done to it by the several bullets that had perforated it. There are also references on the report to the age, sex, and height of the individual. Indeed, the picture that one gets from reading the report is that the crim...
A DETECTIVE NOVEL?
Although Ballad of Dogs’ Beach has all the trappings of a detective novel, the storyline is not extremely complex or complicated. Cardoso Pires is not really interested in all the minute details of the crime, or in disentangling all the clues or following the scent of the affair. What the author strives to pin down is the psychological climate, the fear factor, and the political and social context that makes the crime possible. Therefore, the plot is never highlighted, in the novel, the ident...
REAL-LIFE REACTION TO THE CRIME
In real life and in the novel, opposition groups were quick to accuse the government of committing a heinous political assassination. They also defended vehemently their comrade, the Major, considering him a brave man, someone who had become politicized because he resented the subservience exacted from people by the fascist regime. But in fact and fiction, this comrade is neither a man of honor nor a man of dignity. He is a bully who uses his power to humiliate others and to abuse them physic...
From dictatorship to post-Revolutionary turmoil
In 1982, when Ballad of Dogs’ Beach was published, Portugal was on its way, after a shaky interim, to becoming a stable Western European parliamentary democracy. Years of turmoil during and after the Revolution (1974–76) ended in the firm establishment of a representative, pluralistic government, which remains in place today. The transition from authoritarianism to parliamentary democracy was far from easy, though. In a short span of eight years, Portugal shifted from an anti-communist, anti-...
From the end of the revolutionary period to 1982
Although at the time it was not perceived as a turning point in the democratization of Portugal, the events of November 25, 1975, changed radically its political and economic landscape. The military, through the Council of the Revolution, still exerted considerable clout over the affairs of the state, but its role diminished with the passage of time until in 1982 the Council was abolished altogether. Parliamentary elections had taken place in 1975, a new constitution had taken effect in 1976,...
Reviews
Ballad of Dogs’ Beach has been well received both in Portugal and abroad. It won the APE (Portuguese Association of Writers) Fiction Prize in 1982. The selection committee unanimously considered that the novel had established the standard by which all other novels (about 50) that were competing for the Prize ought to be judged (Alves, p. 6). The novel immediately became a bestseller in Portugal and was subsequently translated into many different languages. Maria Alzira Seixo refers to the wor...
Alves, Clara Ferreira. “Balada de Cardoso Pires Premiada a Cinco Vozes.” Jornal de Letras: Artes e Ideias2, no. 56 (April 12–25, 1983): 6. Ferreira, António Mega. “Entrevista com José Cardoso Pires.” Jornal de Letras: Artes e Ideias2, no. 47 (December 7–20, 1982): 3. Herr, Richard, ed. The New Portugal: Democracy and Europe. Berkeley: University of...
- José Cardoso Pires
- 1982
Ballad of dog beach (1987) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more.
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What is a dog beach?
In Portugal, in the 60s, the corpse of a man appears on Dog’s Beach. The corpse is identified as the major Dantas, a man wanted by authorities after his escape from a military prison where he was awaiting trial for insurrection.
