Aquilino Ribeiro e o caderno de uma guerra mundial a nascer

In 1934, Aquilino Ribeiro publishes his diary É a Guerra [It is War], where he fixed his literary gaze over, gradually determined by the escalation to I World War. At this time Aquilino Ribeiro was often accused of germanophilia. These accusations can be justified by his tempered sincerity about the French side, as we can confirm in this work. É a Guerra follows on a daily basis the time between the outbreak of the conflict and the writer’s return to Portugal, at the end of September 1914. This is a hybrid book which explores both the essayist and journalistic style. With the mixture of genres, Aquilino Ribeiro writes his personal memory of the first decades of the 20th century: of a time when violence promoted by nationalists and imperialists expands. Aquilino talks about the human effervescence of Paris, already transformed by increasing signs of war. Therefore Paris becomes in his writing mostly an unaffectionate city observed in a perplexed and reactive way.