In the last few days I had the good fortune of stumbling across some reference to your latest book (The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon). You see, I am a Portuguese citizen living in the UK for some time and when the saudade afflicts me I have to spend some time in the Web looking for new music, news and photos of my beloved Portugal. After living in Lisboa for 13 years (I am originally from a tiny mountain village in the Serra da Gardunha) it is difficult to let go that city. As someone says on a YouTube LonelyPlanet travel video entitled ‘What is saudade?’, “you don’t find (real) saudade in Lisboa, you find it when you leave Lisboa” (the parenthesis is mine).

I devoured your dispatches posted on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency website and felt like travelling with you and your family through the streets of Lisboa. I just let myself go with you through familiar places, pastelarias, corners…and I enjoyed every single moment. In the end I spoke inward and said “This in an unfair, unbalanced situation. I now know so many things about this lovely family, I walked with them to various physical spaces and inner thoughts and this man knows nothing about me. I have to send a feedback, this position as a ‘voyeur’ is becoming unbearable”. That is why I had to write this post.

I am a fraction of the generational chunk born after the post-25 April democratic revolution and I felt immensely grateful to you when you described so accurately our dreams and frustrations as a generation in your last dispatch (Dispatch 20: Fairly Medieval). I have used the verb “feel” several times in this small text (er…not that small really), perhaps too many times, but that just a reflexion of what your book is capable of doing so well: transmitting feelings.

Muito obrigado.

Vitor