Jaime Montestrela

Jaime Montestrela (June 12, 1925 in Lisbon, Portugal — November 8, 1975, Paris) is a fictional Portuguese poet and writer, which appears in the books by Hervé Le Tellier.

Fictional Biography

Jaime Monstestrela was born in 1925. His mother was from Madrid, his father a Portuguese surgeon. He belongs to this generation of Portuguese writers of the Salazar dictatorship years, which counts among its ranks Augusto Abaleira or Eugenio de Andrade. He studied medicine and began a career in psychiatry at the Miguel Bombarda hospital, Lisbon. In 1950, he published a book of poetry, Prisão under the name of Jaime Caixas, named after the prison where political dissidents were tortured and imprisoned. Exiled in Brazil in 1951, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, was naturalized and became a friend of the writer and critic Jorge de Sena, before leaving the country in 1965, when the military seized power. He moved to Paris, where he died in 1975 from a vascular incident. Its texts are traversed by the questions of God's absence, of the physical decline. Capable as well of humor or gravity, lyricism or scatology, he was a friend of Surrealist artists and members of the Oulipo.

Books

• Prisão (1950)
• Cidade de lama, (1962)
• Contos aquosos, (1974). The French translation by Hervé Le Tellier received in 2013 the Prix de l'Humour noir, a French "Prize of Black Humor".