Since the 25'h of April 1974 Revolution, many Portuguese narratives have focused on Portugal's immediate historical past, specifically the era associated with Salazar and the Estado Novo, the fascist period. These works of fiction have dealt with different aspects and experiences of the period and, even different decades, but all of them symbolically portray the period as a dark cloud passing over Portugal, that is, a cloud associated with supposedly moral and cultural revival, patriotism, belligerent nationalism and glorification of the past, usually to hide the shortcomings and failures of fascism. Among the many literary texts that have dealt with this bleak period of Portuguese history, one finds JosC Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and Cadeira, MLio Cliudio's Tocata para Dois Clarins, Eduarda Dionisio's Retrato dum Amigo Enquanto Falo, JosC Cardoso Pires's Ballad of Dogs ' Beach, Manuel Alegre's Com Alma, Baptista Bastos's 0 Cavalo a Tinta-da-China, Lidia Jorge's 0 Dia dos Prodigios and 0 Vale da PaixZo, Teolinda Gerslo's Paisagern corn Mar e Mulher ao Fundo, Antonio Lobo Antunes's Fado Alexandrine, Nuno Judice's Visperas de Sombra, and many others. Most of the narratives of the Colonial Wars have also taken into account the so-called rhetoric of empire formulated by Salazar and his fascist cohorts directly responsible for the African debacle and, therefore, had to deal with the ideological dynamics of fascism. All of these texts, including those focusing on the Colonial Wars, were written to unmask the articulation of a Portuguese nation constructed as an inherent political destiny that derives its essence from God and Christianity, as well as from the evocation of examples from a petrified past. Portuguese fascism may have felt that it was necessary to uphold Christian principles and the glory of a mythic past as the basis for social cohesion, the revival of spiritual values and a national reawakening, but, as contemporary narratives reveal, the use of these discourses was just the rationale behind fascism's wanton destruction of liberty and life or what Dave Renton, in Fascism: Theory an Practice, labels fascism: a specific form of reactionary mass movement (3) that is the enemy of democracy and denigrates human life. Although there is not a general consensus regarding an empirical definition of fascism, there are certainly many concepts and theories that can be singled out that give a general interpretation of the significance of fascism in the cultural and political life of Portugal for