José Cardoso Pires

After the Carnation Revolution, Portugal seemed to have left behind the shadow of Salazarism. But in And Now, José?, José Cardoso Pires returns to the former headquarters of the PIDE—the dictatorship’s political police—only to discover that the past has not disappeared; it is quietly reshaping itself.

Summoned to review a case file, the author is confronted with a troubling paradox: former torturers move freely once again, the structures of power remain largely intact, and justice is still administered by those who upheld the regime. What was meant to be a time of rupture reveals itself instead as an ambiguous terrain, where memory fades and recent history risks being rewritten.

From this experience, Cardoso Pires constructs a hybrid work—part chronicle, part essay, part memoir—that examines the partial failure of the revolutionary impulse and the dangers of forgetting too quickly. Through personal reflections, tributes, and political insight, the book becomes a lucid warning: if the past is not confronted, it returns—quieter, perhaps, but just as persistent.

With mordant, disenchanted prose, And Now, José? poses a question that still resonates today: what happens when history seems to move forward, yet in reality turns in circles?