The Old Ones

A man in a hospital sees everything differently. Time seems to pass more slowly, or more quickly, but no longer as it did before. The people around him cease to be his people, those he loves, and instead become the whole world, with their own stories, fears, and ways of measuring time.

In Os Velhos, Vítor Serpa, an author skilled in the art of storytelling, from the coolness of journalism to the warmer temperature of fiction, writes about him—perhaps in his most autobiographical style yet—but also about the person in the next bed, as if he were the Portugal in the next bed, ill and uncertain, in a time that seems unsure of its own pace, disrupted by the turmoil of Covid-19, unsettled by technological modernity and by violent generational divides.

The time of books is never new or old. The time of books is the time in which they are written. And this book, Os Velhos, is from today.