“Redeeming Love” Published

According to the correspondent of the Iran Book News Agency (IBNA), Camilo Castelo states in the preface to ‘Redeeming Love’: ‘A reader will turn two hundred pages of this book, but will find no trace of happy love or a good example, or if they do, it will be very faint and fleeting.

Three sections of this novel describe the misfortunes of ill-fated love. Therefore, a critic, who is an expert in titling works, if they were to question the suitability of this work’s title, might find fault and argue that pure love, meaning redeeming love, arrives late to erase the effects of impure love, namely evil love, from the mind.

In humble response, I say: “Redeeming love,” in many hidden cases, is a love that tortures and disgraces. It is then that sound reason reminds one of the heart’s ugliness and humiliation. Conscience is revived, and the purified heart gains strength to accept a blameless, flawless, and honorable love. Just like calm bays situated beyond mountainous waves; those very waves that throw out the body of a shipwreck survivor clinging to a plank. If it weren’t for the storm’s impact, that shipwreck survivor would perish in the deep sea. In fact, the storm saves them.

Also, happiness is in the form of a short and concise story, summarized in a few pages. Happiness is a brief and fleeting dream, but its boundless epics must be sought in the inner, unspoken feeling of consciousness. In contrast, misfortune knows no bounds for experience and imagination.

Redeeming Love narrates the devotion of Afonso de Teive and Mafalda; a love that leads to marriage and happiness. ‘That lady I showed you, with simple and disheveled clothes from the embrace of her eight children, is my cousin Mafalda; my soulmate, my heart’s savior, my eyes that look at me with my mother’s eyes, my conscious awareness, the keeper of childish joys, the mother of my eight children whom my mother sent to me from heaven. For ten years, I have sung the dawn of my days like birds, I praise God and pray to Him like hermits. My wife, by opening the treasures of her soul to me, also revealed the treasures of faith; the joys of religiosity and an unfillable cup of the sweet taste of charity. Sometimes Mafalda disappears with my older children. While I hold the younger ones, I hold them in my arms and go out of the house to look for her. I find that pious helper in the newspaper vendor’s cave. Beside a bed of dry reeds, above a patient for whom she has brought food and clothing…’

Negah Publications recently released this book, translated by Mehdi Boostani, in 194 pages.