Written in 1927, Josâe Rodrigues Miguâeis's Happy Easter was a potent challenge to the realism which had dominated the landscape of European fiction. This brief novel remains a vivid and challenging work: it has long been celebrated in Portugal and throughout the Continent as a radical classic. Here it is translated into English for the first time. The protagonist, a singularly imaginative individual, suffers symptoms of paranoia and schizophrenia. Shut into himself, isolated from the world but not ignorant of it, he lives out a fantasy as a protest against the humiliation and hostility which, as he gradually reveals, have shaped him since childhood. Yet there, in the asylum he inhabits, he declares triumphantly that he has found his true self.
