A slow waltz dance from the depths

Author's name: Jose Cardoso Pereira Publisher: Tanmia for Publishing and Distribution Year of publication: 2026 Literary classification: Biographies and Memoirs Brief about the book: The Portuguese writer Jose Cardoso Pereira (1925-1998) recounts his experience with the stroke that struck him in 1995. But he does not do so with a tongue, a doctor’s tongue, nor with a friend’s tongue, but with the tongue of a person split in two, who began to observe himself during his absence. This perspective offers us a disturbing story, in which the writer reclaims objects and their functions as he reclaims words. It is a story of life's fragility, and everything we have accumulated over the years that we can lose in seconds. This slow dance of the body transports to another place where there is no memory, and where the slightest reference outside of time and outside of the body disappears. It lasted two weeks, and the writer could have returned from it, or perhaps never fully returned, as his friend João Lobo Antunes, a neurosurgeon, confirms in the long introduction titled "A Letter to a New Friend." It is a short story that takes us to the writer’s fall and his rise again, and his ability to read and write once more, with all the horror this stage may evoke in anyone who has witnessed it from the outside.