《The Forbidden Kingdom》

In this highly original novel Slauerhoff (1898-1936) reprises major themes from his poetry (erotic obsession, nomadism, persecution and confused identity) within a more ambitious formal framework. The book interweaves three narratives, separated in time but linked by a common association with the 'forbidden kingdom' of China. The first of these is the brutal and bloody founding of Macau by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century. Second is the exile from Portugal to the Far East later in the same century of a minor noble and poet, Luis Vaz de Camoes, later author of the national epic of discovery Os Lusiadas (1572). Finally, there is the Odyssey through the Orient of an anonymous, almost Conradian, twentieth-century ship's wireless operator, drawn to Macau and China by the desire to merge either with Camoes' ghost or with the masses, and to be rid of the burden of his own identity.