BESSA LUS, MARIA AGUSTINA

born Oct. 15, 1922, Vila Me, Port. novelist and short-story writer influenced by Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka whose fiction diverged from the predominantly neorealistic regionalism of mid-20th-century Portuguese literature to incorporate elements of surrealism. Of the more than a dozen novels Bessa Lus had published by the late 20th century, the best known was A Sibila (1954; The Sybil), which won the Ea de Queirs prize and in which the boundary between physical, psychological, and ironic reality is tenuous and the characters gain an almost mythic quality. In Bessa Lus's fiction, notions of time and space become vague, and planes of reality flow together, dimming the sense of a logical order of events. Her prose has been called metaphysical and ultra-psychological, and Kafkaesque elements may be distinguished in the fictional world she creates. Other well-known novels of Bessa Lus include Os Incurveis (1956; The Incurables), A Muralha (1957; The Stone Wall), O Susto (1958; The Fright), O Manto (1961; The Mantle), and O Sermo de Fogo (1963; The Sermon of Fire).