The Last Songs of Autumn

Tragic fate pursues the Count of Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse) from his childhood, when, at the age of two, he witnesses the suicide of Célestine, his mother, on Christmas Eve, 1847. Eleven years later, with epidemics and wars tearing at Uruguay, his father, the diplomat François Ducasse, puts the boy on a ship and sends him to the south of France to be educated. He suffers horrific anguish there and resists the approaches of pedophiles within the scholastic prisons of Tarbes...
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Tragic fate pursues the Count of Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse) from his childhood, when, at the age of two, he witnesses the suicide of Célestine, his mother, on Christmas Eve, 1847. Eleven years later, with epidemics and wars tearing at Uruguay, his father, the diplomat François Ducasse, puts the boy on a ship and sends him to the south of France to be educated. He suffers horrific anguish there and resists the approaches of pedophiles within the scholastic prisons of Tarbes and Pau. At the age of eighteen, holding a baccalauréat degree and with some of his unfinished songs in hand, he takes on the pseudonym the "Count of Lautréamont" and enters the literary world of Paris and Brussels. Rejected by publishers, the young writer abandons his studies and takes on a life of luxury at his father's expense. When everything seems to be going well for this precocious dandy, his father, angry at his exuberant lifestyle, deserts him. In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War breaks out and the French empire falls at the feet of Bismarck. Decadence overtakes his guardian, the banker Jean Darasse, leading both Isidore and François Ducasse into bankruptcy, and leaving the elder diplomat practically penniless in South America, a region that is also in flames. At the age of twenty-four, without means to support himself in Room 7 on Faubourg-Montmartre Street and profoundly depressed at the carnage of bodies piling up in the streets of Paris, the young writer takes to living cloistered in his own tedium, making of literature his escape, and carrying on a daily struggle against the pernicious idea of suicide. Will Isidore Ducasse be able to survive these tragic turns of events or will they change his life forever? AUTHOR The novelist, playwright, script writer, and sociologist Ruy Câmara was born in 1954 in Recife, and spent his childhood in Fortaleza, state of Ceará. Before turning to literature Câmara pursued a most varied career. Having graduated in mechanical technology, he studied production engineering, philosophy and sociology while also specializing in drama for theater, cinema and television. "In 1991 I suffered a tragedy that greatly affected my family and left me with no way to find meaning in life. In spite of the pain and the longing that I felt, my fascination with literature intensified and I started to imagine that I could use it as my personal refuge and then allow it to become a major life enterprise. The problem was how to support my children by writing books." In 1992 he brought his family together and announced that he was quitting his business career to devote himself entirely to literature. The Last Songs of Autumn, his first novel, was a first Finalist for the Jabuti Prize of the Brazilian Book Chamber in 2004; was awarded the Fiction Prize by the Brazilian Academy of Letters as the Best Novel of 2004 and Prize for Translation, by Writers' Association of Bucharest, 2009. The author lives in Brazil and his book, called by critics a contemporary classic, has been translated and published in more than 30 countries.