For the film see Anguish (film)

Anguish (film)

Anguish is a 1987 Spanish produced horror film starring Zelda Rubinstein, Michael Lerner, Talia Paul, Angel Jove and Clara Pastor.-Plot:...

Angústia is a book by Graciliano Ramos

Graciliano Ramos

Graciliano Ramos de Oliveira was a Brazilian Post-Modernist writer, politician and journalist. In most of his novels he depicts the precarious situation of the poor inhabitants of the Brazilian sertão.-Life:Graciliano Ramos de Oliveira was born in the city of Quebrangulo, in the Brazilian State...

 that tells the life of Luís da Silva, a man very confused with his own life.

One day, he meets Marina, his new neighbour, a beautiful girl with whom he falls in love. From this point, the monotony of his life is abruptly changed for a voluntary thought about the family, the childhood and the present, when Julião Tavares, a rich man, fell in love with Marina.

Style

Though the book is considered modernist, the author also makes use of Symbolism

Symbolism (arts)

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

 and Naturalism

Naturalism (literature)

Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...

. His theories about romance

Romantic love

Romance is the pleasurable feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.In the context of romantic love relationships, romance usually implies an expression of one's love, or one's deep emotional desires to connect with another person....

 are shown when he describes the angst of the principal character, Luís da Silva: suffering, anxiety, a feeling of sickness. It's curious to say but there's an influence from the psychoanalysis, too, when the imagined disease of Luís da Silva begins to change his behavior and his sense of reality. Thus, Graciliano Ramos

Graciliano Ramos

Graciliano Ramos de Oliveira was a Brazilian Post-Modernist writer, politician and journalist. In most of his novels he depicts the precarious situation of the poor inhabitants of the Brazilian sertão.-Life:Graciliano Ramos de Oliveira was born in the city of Quebrangulo, in the Brazilian State...

 is one of the greatest authors of Brazilian modernism, transcending regional limits with his literary style, in comparison with Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

.