ntonio Henriques´ work is vast and ranges from fictional literature to essays on philosophy, art, politics and other themes. Below you may read an abstract of his books and to read the extracts, just click on the book covers.
To download Antonio Henriques´ Bibliographic Synthesis, click here.

TRANSECRISE belongs to the author´s adolescent phase; it was written between the age of 14 and 19 and includes tales, poems and other texts, difficult to label.  In this work the author´s incredible imagination, built upon images which spring up from the collective unconsciousness of myths and symbols, stands out, and the latter make sense as they unfold into a linkage composed of raving thoughts. His writings unite surrealistic and poetic images to mystic ideas and magic ideograms, composing a unique whole, regarding both content and form. It expresses a timeless subjectivism, but may be comprehended also according to the period it was written in, the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, during which the adolescence of a generation, alienated and gagged by the dictatorship in post-64 Brazil, locked up in itself, went crazy, listening to the echoes of rebellion and youth in the whole world. His linguistic experimentalism also belongs to this period, in which grammar is used the other way round, through a discourse of language of an unconscious flow, where the words are associated even to sounds, structuring phrases without syntax rules, allowing for new vocables to appear, but with spontaneous and natural meanings. Transecrise brings forward a game of communication and solitude, a duality of sounds and silences, as presented by the preface.

MEMORIES OF A STORM is a novel that mixes fiction, an essay and memories. The central character is simultaneously an actor, spectator and narrator: he lives, narrates and meditates, telling his memoires, from birth to after his death. His considerations, quite original in both form and context, contrast light and shadow and comprise themes such as: love, sexuality, racism, violence, youth, drugs, religion, spirituality, politics, old age, sickness and death, the philosophical sense of existence and other themes.

The central character, devoid of a name, is bare of heroism and the story developes in the midst of an intimistic, dramatic, deep, complex perspective. Some chapters have a dominant theme, guiding the narrative towards a specific temporality, which, on the whole, means that the character lives simultaneously in different worlds of probabilities or parallel spaces/time. Some dreams are described by emphasizing the subjectivity of the text, which unfolds from a personal unconsciousness to a collective one of symbols and myths. The chapters are divided into blocks, which sometimes have more autonomy and flirt along with other literary genders, as tales, chronicles, essays and poetry, composing a mosaic of post-modern universalism. The book begins and ends with a quotation of Shakespeare´s “The Storm” and two characters (Ariel and Miranda) are named after the ones in the play.

In the book, the narrator describes the childhood and youth of the character, his family context and juvenile rebellions, enthralled in a backstage of adolescent global activities. The character becomes a painter and sculpturer, a professor of art, a union militant and deputy, until he gives up politics and reassumes his creative life until his old age. In the personal context there are many love affairs, he marries and gets divorced more than once, has children, lives through tragedies and dramas, seeks shelter in spirituality, faces objective and subjective challenges, until he finds a bit of peace in wisdom.

The debut of ANTONIO HENRIQUES’ novel reveals a mature and original writer, which is certainly a surprise in the contemporary Brazilian literary panorama. “Memories of a Storm” will be, no doubt, a literary landmark, because it points towards new tendencies and directions, according to the globalization of culture.

Rui Barbosa de Souza (the Editor)

YOGA & CONSCIOUSNESS was the essay which conferred to the author, Antônio Henriques, the title of Master in Philosophy in 1982. This work has the subtitle: “the question of consciousness in the Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali”, that is why it demonstrates that Patanjali´s work is a uniquely updated psychological philosophy. The Yoga-Sutras were probably written around the third century b.C. and constitute what traditionally is called the “Classic Yoga”, for they abridge all the central ideas of the Yoga philosophy in four books, each one containing a couple of Sutras.

In his work, not only does Henriques explain the unintelligibleness in its original version, but he also manages to establish a contemporary parallel with science, philosophy and psychoanalysis, bringing a new sense to the ideas of the Classic Yoga. On the other hand, he demonstrates the links of the Yoga-Sutras with the autochthonous culture of ancient India, the Dravida, opposed to the later Yoga, strongly influenced by the Arians.

So, the author not only recovers meditation and the postures as the essence of Yoga, but also elucidates and delineates the altered states of consciousness which the practitioners aim at reaching. This work is the first serious academic research study on Indian philosophy written by a Brazilian, which surely may occupy the same place as the ones written by famous international specialists.

2000

1991

In 1991 the author published INTRODUCTION TO ORIENTALISM, by the Editor EST of Porto Alegre, a book which initially had been conceived to be a booklet of the collection “O Que é” (What Is?) of the Editora Brasiliense and that turned into a greater work, for more restricted readers and ended up being published as a book with 233 pages by the publishing house Editora EST, outside the collection. In 2000 the author resumed the original project, took out almost all the second part of the book “Introduction to Orientalism” and republished it under the name “Initiation to Orientalism”, with the  Editora Record´s seal “Nova Era” (new age), as part of the collection on “Initiation”.

The work under the seal Nova Era was proofread and received a note on the Dalai Lama and the Chinese presence in Tibet, which the first edition didn´t have. It exposes not only what is Orientalism, but also comprises and synthesizes the whole Eastern thought, including India, China, Japan and Tibet. Different Yoga sources appear, like Buddhism in its many versions, Bushido and the Tibetan thought. It includes also some considerations on the main Eastern ideas in the West, among which: karma, reincarnation, psychic corporality, mental power and cosmic consciousness. On the other hand, the new edition lost the study of the influence of Orientalism on the Western Culture, including such areas as philosophy, science, psychoanalysis, arts (plastic arts, dance, music, theatre and literature), including the theme of counterculture and the existing preconception about the East in the West.