Memoirs of a militia sergeant

Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant is the only novel by Manuel Antonio de Almeida (Brazil, 1831-1861). It was written for the brochure of the Rio newspaper Correio Mercantil when the author was only twenty-two years old and has become a benchmark of realistic narrative in Brazil.
It is a picaresque novel, of the poor life in Rio de Janeiro of John VI. It constitutes a gallery of popular types while presenting a synchronous cut of Brazilian family life in urban environments. Thus he narrates a time when a social structure prevailed that was no longer colonial, although it was still far from the bourgeois industrial picture.
Social realism, costumbrismo and a picaresque character are the three pillars that converge in this novel.

“Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant is one of those books that sometimes burst, so to speak, on the margins of literature. What moves its authors is essentially a temperamental reaction, which leads them to confront the rhetoric of their time and a “realistic” vision of life, enriched by them with the deliberate accentuation of facts and people, using humor, sarcasm, grotesque or caricatural profile, or mockery.

Mario de Andrade

Translation by Elvio Romero.