The French Jorge Amado.

This essay deals with Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado (1912-2001). Firstly, it addresses Amado's many connections between his work and France and French writers. Secondly, it examines more deeply one of these connections by focusing on the opposition between truth and fiction in Amado's Navegacao de cabotagem. Apontamentos para um livro de memorias que jamais escreverei (1992). Spanish and French are the only languages into which the integrality of Amado's oeuvre has been translated into. In addition, Amado is one of the very few foreign writers to have been invited to all the most renowned cultural shows on French television: Apostrophes, Thalassa, Ex Libris, Droits d'auteurs, Le Cercle de Minuit. He was even the guest of honor in three television shows entirely dedicated to him: Le Grand Echiquier, Un Siecle d'ecrivains, and Etoile Palace. He was awarded some of the most prestigious honors and awards in France, among which two doctorates honoris causa from the university of Paris-Sorbonne and from the University of Lyon 2 and the Legion of Honor, in 1984. The Amados traveled all around the world but it is in France that they sojourned most often and where they ended up buying an apartment in Paris, quai des Celestins, in the district of the Marais. If Amado wrote several of his novels during prolonged stays in both London and Paris, he never talks about his experiences in the English capital in his memoirs Navegacao de cabotagem. He provides no records either of the four months that he spent as writer in residence at Pennsylvania State University in the early 1970s. (1) On the other hand, he does write pages and pages on his life in Paris. On many occasions, Amado has claimed his love for France and Paris in particular. For example, in a long interview published in 1988, Amado declares to feel very French and to feel at home in only two places: Bahia and Paris (Assis Pacheco, 12, 14).