Alysson’s Weblog

A literatura árabe ainda é um terreno obscuro no Ocidente. Nem autores premiados como Naguib Mahfouz são muito lidos desse lado do mundo. Talvez, a obra mais difundida ainda seja As Mil e Uma Noites. Elias Khoury é um dos autores libaneses mais conhecidos e elogiados da atualidade, e Porta do Sol, lançado no Brasil há pouco, é considerado por muitos sua obra-prima.

A relação direta entre o romance de Khoury e o clássico árabe pode ser um bom começo para o tornar mais conhecido no Ocidente. Nos Estados Unidos e na Europa, quando publicado há alguns anos, Porta do Sol arrancou diversos elogios e foi considerado pelo Le Monde Diplomatique o melhor livro daquele ano. A escritora norte-americana Lorraine Adams disse no The New York Times que “existem romances poderosos sobre palestinos escritos por palestinos, mas poucos jogam luz sobre os mitos, lendas e rumores sobre Israel e os árabes com tanto discernimento e compaixão. [Esse] é um romance muito rico e realista, uma verdadeira obra-prima”.

Traduzido por Safa A-C Jubran, o livro de Khoury é narrado por um médico que conversa com um amigo moribundo. Ele conta histórias, mitos, lendas e fatos reais, um seguido do outro – um final não é nada mais do que um começo. Assim, a narrativa segue a tradição de Xerazade que tece histórias para sobreviver. Khalil acredita que isso vai manter seu amigo vivo.

“Há três meses sinto-me incapaz de me emocionar”, conta-nos o narrador, “apenas este homem suspenso sobre seu leito me faz sentir a tremura das coisas. Há três meses está deitado sobre essa cama de hospital da Galiléia, onde trabalho como médico, ou onde faço de conta que sou médico. Sento-me ao seu lado e tento. Ele está morto ou vivo? Conto-lhe histórias ou escuto?”.

A colagem de histórias, que datam de 1948 até o presente, formam um painel vasto da relação entre Palestina e Israel. É aí que conhecemos os personagens interessantes e complexos, envolvendo paixões, medos, sucessos, vinganças e conquistas. 

A discussão entre os dois homens no quarto de hospital não só revela sobre essa amizade peculiar, como também sobre as mulheres de suas vidas. Daí emergem momentos e histórias de amor, como a do moribundo Yunes e sua amada Nahilah, que por décadas se encontraram na caverna Bab al-Shams (o termo árabe para porta do sol) onde podiam ter um tempo para eles namorarem e discutirem sobre os filhos.

Enquanto no Ocidente o livro foi bem recebido, quando publicado em hebreu Porta do Sol causou polêmica. O jornalista e historiador israelense Tom Segev disse no jornal Ha’aretz que o romance vai além da licença poética de Khoury. Ele alega que “se não há uma verdade [para os incidentes], não é certo fazer uso ficcional deles. Khoury não é conhecido em Israel, e não há motivos para se acreditar nele”.

Ao incitar reações tão contundentes como a de Segev, o escritor libanês parece ter conseguido expor o radicalismo de alguns pensadores que negam as conseqüências de suas próprias ideologias. Por isso, além das qualidades literárias, Porta do Sol se torna uma leitura fundamental para os nossos tempos.

Nothing is perfect. A marriage that seems to be unshakable may be just hiding dark cracks beneath a beautifully polished surface. That is one of the things one can learn from James Salter’s classic novel “Light Years”. Originally published in 1975, the book has become a fine example about family dynamics and failed expectations.

Nedra and Vidri form an untouchable couple, parents to two also perfect girls, the four of them lead a dreaming life until reality becomes stronger than appearances. Neither him, nor her is happy person, and the liaison is just kept because it is easier to be together than apart. That is what it seems. They have strong bounds - mostly because of their children. In a tender scene, we see them producing a book about an ell for the children. Nedra thinks the children book that exist are no good. Mother and father are really into completing the task. This is a familiar moment that becomes a remembrance in the far lost past.

As the narratives of “Light Years” moves on, Salter deconstruct the supposed perfect marriage into a group of people falling apart. The parents are so absorbed in their failed relationship that they hardly notice their kids are also a mess - self-destruction runs in the family.

Salter’s language is poetic however direct. The narrative is told in a fractured way, with jump cuts from a time to time. These devices make “Light Years” a sophisticated reading experience. But the best in the novel, the writer’s wise perception of the American marriage. This is a beautiful novel that has an interesting dialogue with Richard Yeats’ “Revolutionary Road“.

Once upon a time there was a Brooklyn middle-aged couple whose marital life was that great, but they could handle that. But on a weekend everything happened. The husband was dumped by his business partner, husband and wife bring up all the past resentment and, on the top of that, she is bitten by a stray cat. This is just the beginning.

The bite is the starter - or the materialization - of a bigger crisis. The time is the late 1960s when the world was changing very fast, but the Bentwoods weren’t ready for that apparently. They are swallowed up by the new world where their way of life seems to have no place anymore.

Published in the 1970s, “Desperate Characters” is a short novel with pathos and comic moments. In a few pages Fox is able to capture a moment that influences both historical and personal levels. There is a strong narrative populated by complex characters. Everything is very subtle and with nuance.

Lóri e Ulisses se amam. Mas não estão prontos para ficar juntos. Cada um tem o seu tempo para processar um sentimento, uma relação, uma emoção. “Esperarei nem que sejam anos que você também tenha corpo-alma para amar”, diz ele. Essa eterna busca do outro é que move as páginas “Uma Aprendizagem ou o Livro dos Prazeres”, de Clarice Lispector.

Esse é um romance de formação – de formação de personagens, de formação de leitores, de formação de almas, como boa parte da obra da escritora. São dois personagens em busca de si e de outras pessoas e sentimentos que o complementem, ou, por assim dizer, algo que os eleve a um outro patamar na escala evolutiva. Mas, Lóri e Ulisses estão em níveis diferentes. Aparentemente, ele está um pouco acima dela. E, possivelmente por isso mesmo, ele tem o altruísmo de a esperar – a isso muita gente chama de amor.

“[Faz] de conta que vivia e não que estivesse morrendo pois viver afinal não passava de se aproximar cada vez mais da morte” é dito. Viver, no universo de Clarice, é um processo doloroso, mas nem por isso ruim, é um aprendizado afinal, e cada um o faz da sua forma. “[O] mundo é uma festa que termina em morte e em cheiro de cravo murcho na lapela.” Mas enquanto nada disso chega, viver e aprender são a melhor saída.

Em sua jornada, Ulisses conta que uma das coisas que aprendeu ‘é que se deve viver apesar de. Apesar de, se deve comer. Apesar de, se deve amar. Apesar de, se deve morrer. Inclusive, muitas vezes é o próprio apesar de que nos empurra para frente’. Assim, os personagens insistem em viver e amar, apesar de. Lóri não faz idéia de como se entregar plenamente, está sempre em dúvida de seus sentimentos e atos. Por isso mesmo, é uma personagem interessante. Professorinha do interior, agora vive na cidade grande, onde tenta manter seus mesmos padrões, acrescentando um novo modus operandi. Compra roupinhas para os seus alunos, os agrada – mas sente um nó na garganta quando pensa em liga para Ulisses.

Ela, e principalmente o leitor, perceberá que conquistar algo é uma jornada árdua. Na abertura do romance “A Paixão Segundo G. H”, a mesma autora lembra os ‘possíveis leitores’ de que pessoas com a alma já formada são aquelas ‘que sabem que a aproximação, do que quer que seja, se faz gradualmente e penosamente – atravessando inclusive o oposto daquilo de que quer se aproximar’ – talvez para ver se vale a pena o investimento de tempo e energia. Mas outro artista tão sábio quanto Clarice, chamado Fernando Pessoa, disse que ‘tudo vale a pena se a alma não é pequena’. E se há algo que os personagens de “Uma Aprendizagem ou o Livro dos Prazeres” não têm é uma alma pequena. Por isso, para eles, vale toda a energia investida em qualquer coisa – nem que seja apenas ‘viver, apesar de’. “A tragédia de viver existe sim e nós a sentimos. Mas isso não impede que tenhamos uma profunda aproximação da alegria com essa mesma vida”.

Os nomes Loreley – apelidada Lóri – e Ulisses vêm de lendas tão antigas quanto o tempo. O dela é do folclore alemão, e era uma mulher que seduzia pescadores e estes se atiravam no mar, morrendo vítimas do encanto da moça. Já o protagonista tem o mesmo nome do personagem grego que atravessa o mar e resiste ao canto das sereias. Duas tradições que envolvem água, sedução e engano. “Aí estava o mar, a mais inteligível das existências não-humanas. E ali estava a mulher, de pé, o mais inteligível dos seres vivos. Como o ser humano fizera um dia  uma pergunta sobre si mesmo, tornara o mais inteligível dos seres onde circulava sangue. Ele e o mar.”

Ao longo de praticamente quarenta anos desde sua primeira publicação, “Uma Aprendizagem ou o Livro dos Prazeres” se tornou uma das obras fundamentais no conjunto de Clarice – um dos livros mais amados também. Isso talvez se deva porque o romance se comunica tão claramente com as pessoas por causa da jornada de nossa evolução. É um livro que não traz respostas – ainda bem, pois estas seriam limitadoras – nem levanta perguntas, mas explora a dura jornada da existência.

“‘Não entender’ era tão vasto que ultrapassava qualquer entender. Entender era sempre limitado”, diz Clarice num momento de divagação de Lóri. Por isso mesmo este romance é para ser não-compreendido – o que é diferente de incompreendido – é para ser sentido, em lugar de apenas lido. É, no fim, uma longa jornada, na qual cada um segue em sua própria velocidade, seja de mãos dadas com Lóri, com Ulisses, com Clarice ou com outra pessoa – ou até mesmo sozinho – mas um caminho necessário.

José Saramago’s “Blindness” is one of the most strange and most readable novel from his body of work. The action is always moving forward, there is only one narrator (”Balthazar and Blimunda” has a couple of them), and the narrative reads like a thriller in a crescendo until it reaches an ending that makes a lot of sense in the narrative.

“Blindness” takes place in a nameless city and in an identified time. Suddenly, in the end of the second paragraph a man announces that he is blind. There is no apparent reason for the conditions and his ophthalmologist decides to study the case. But no sooner he stars his research than the doctor becomes blind himself. The government of this place decides to act and isolate all the blinds in an old facility. But that doesn’t stop the blindness to be spread and contaminated the whole town.

The only person immune to the condition is the doctor’s wife who never become blind, but pretend not seeing to follow and help her husband. She becomes the eyes of a group of people whose eye are no longer effective.

For Saramago, this group of people represents more than what they are. Nobody has a name, but they are identified by what would be their most important characteristic in the narrative, so we have, the doctor, the wife, the first blind, the car thief, a girl in sunglasses and so on. This device makes them something bigger than mere human beings - they are the human condition itself.

Blindness brings up the most inner - and sometimes creepiest - characteristic of each person. Killing, stealing and even raping become very easy and the primordial way of defense. Words are substituted by actions - and kindness is not very common.

Saramago is - alongside Antonio Lobo Antunes - one of the most important contemporary writers from Portugal. His prose is not easy and sometime he hasn’t much hope for humanity. But in “Blindness” some light emerges from the darkness in the end. We human can survive a plague and even learn something from it - or not.

He never psychologizes his characters or their conditions. There is no explanation - and it is never important because he is working with how we deal with the unexpected and unknown, and not from what they come. In the end everything makes perfect sense and the characters are no longer the same - nor is the reader, who has seen a little more about human condition.

Jay McInerney’s funny and smart debut “Bright Lights, Big City” was published about 25 years ago. The current Vintage Contemporary edition features in its cover a drawing of a men entering the Odeon and the Twin Towers in the background - as if we all needed to remember this was a book written much before the loss of the innocence.

The set is New York in the middle 1980s, when AIDS wasn’t the issue and the city fuelled with cocaine and neon. That decade always seem to be something lost in time. And literature and cinema handles it this way. “Bight Lights, Big City” is sort of a lighter and smarter cousin of “American Psycho”, which handles the same generation. But McInerney’s prose is much well handed and his narrative more effective than Breat Easton Ellis’. The novel is entirely written in the second person, and it feels like `you’ is just one more character.

Rarely did a writer capture the 1980s zeitgeist as McInerney. We see his nameless protagonist frantically crossing the city after drugs, women or something he lost in his life and doesn’t know. The plot unfolds in a New York minute. The writer has the ear for capturing vivid and believable dialogues, while creating interesting characters.

However fun it is to read “Bright Lights, Big City”, it is impossible not to notice that it is above all a sad story. The main character is only going through the motions, just the course life takes. He never takes the plunge to change his destiny. Could he if he tried? Maybe so. We’ll never know. But what we do know is that McInerney has written a novel that will last for ages. When people in the future wonders how the 1980s was like

When you have Alice Munro’s short stories, the first question that pops up is who needs a novel? This writer is able to concentrate the whole world in a couple of pages with beauty, sincerity and talent — doing more than many writers attempt to do in hundreds of pages (and many fails) in only a couple. Her collection “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” is one of the best examples of fulfillment, because she manages to create stories that are complete and leave a lot of room for discussion and imagination — just like the best texts are supposed to be.

The universe that she brings to her stories is populated with human beings dealing with critical situations. Someone who lost a beloved one, another person who is losing her mind, some else who’s lost his/her dignity and so on. In other words, these are characters that are somehow living on the edge of a change.

And because they make them so believable, the reader can easily identify him/herself with those people. Moreover, the situation exploited in the plot — that might read unreal in someone else’s hands — is very plausible. Munro is interested as much as in the inner life of her characters as in the outside life they lead. In this fashion, she is able to fully develop portrays of the human beings that sometimes may seem to want something but are heading to something else — the eternal paradox of being.

In one of the best stories of this collection, “The Bear that Came Over the Mountain”, we have a man dealing with his wife’s mental health. But the writer uses this device as a starter, because what she is talking about in this story is faith. The faith we have in other people, the faith we assume we are the one in control. As the narrative progresses, the man is forced to deal with his woman `infidelity’. He himself was unfaithful to her a long time ago, and now it is the other way round. But since she is sick, the whole plot goes to another path beyond the trivial.

In the story that gives the title to be book, a woman is forced to leave her town and move to a place where she’ll be the nanny of a girl who lost her mother, and whose father is sick. The woman is a strange element that will alter the life of the whole city — and more specifically of the girl. Again, Munro is dealing with the situations we can’t control. Tired of that woman, the girl will plot something to get rid of her, but, things never get the way we expect.

Her keen eye for detail and for the importance of ordinary events in our everyday lives — that in the long run aren’t that ordinary — makes Munro a natural heiress to Chekhov’s style and interests. Pick one of her collections, any one, and you’ll be able to find a new world of humanism and technical quality.

American cinema and literature have glimpsed close at lives in the suburbs with mixed results – some good (“Little Children”, both movie and novel; Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral”, Raymond Carver’s and John Cheever’s stories, among others) and some not so (“American Beauty”). What most of the works focused on suburbia share is the sarcastic tone – rarely a tender look. It is not A. M. Homes’ crafted collection of short stories “The Safety of Objects” that will change it – and that come as a blessing.

Published in the early 1990s, these stories seem to look to a world and a time far, far away. That was when either computer or cell phones were common equipments in everybody’s lives, and there was some innocence that seemed to be lost in the turn of the century. But she is also able to capture the changing of times. One of her characters dreams of ‘a different kind of life, the kind he’d read about in stories of men outdoors, fishing trips and cabins in the woods’.

In “The Safety of Objects”, Homes is more interested in the bizarre than in the peculiar. But the form how she portrays it never turn her characters into freaks. Here we have a fat girl called Chunky ‘in part after the candy bar’; a boy who dates his little sister’s Barbie doll; a couple who behaves like children when her kids are away; and a kidnapped boy who fails his kidnapper expectations.

The writer’s approach is to find the most human side of each of her characters meaning demystifying their possible freakiness. The boy dating the Barbie doll is ‘practicing for the future’, for instance. This story, called “A Real Doll”, by the way, has already become a classic. Another strange person, so to speak, who looks very realistic in Homes’ pages Jim Train, the title character of a story, whose behavior is so bizarre that completely convincing.

The characters who people “The Safety of Objects” are people unsatisfied with their lives who has neither the chance nor the energy to change their present – they are sort of depressed or, at least, bipolar who can’t move on, who is too deep in their nothingness to move over. Take Frank, the protagonist of “The Bullet Catcher”, for instance, his goings to the mall becomes his biggest pleasure, and when his neighbors enters a competition this is one of the most exciting things in his life.

Homes’ writing is sort a combination of Raymond Carver’s sharp look at suburban life with Mary Gaitskill’s taste for strangeness. However, in “The Safety of Objects”, the writer is able to develop her own style which blends fun with a detailed account of dead-end lives. Moreover, she must be one of the best opening-sentences writer ever. “Elaine takes the boys to Florida and drops them off like they’re dry cleaning”. “I’m hiding in the linen closet writing letter to myself”. “If something horrible happens it won’t be my fault”. And the best one: “I’m dating Barbie” – only four words that express so much about a character.

Chekhov is also an important reference when it comes to “The Safety of Objects”. Homes is not only interested in the daily unglamorous lives of suburbia, but she also knows that when you show a gun in the first act, it will have to be fired until the third one.

As one character puts, he has ‘no desire to be beautiful or good. Somehow I suspect because it did not come naturally, I longed to be bad’. Maybe this how Homes expects her writings to be – not bad as in badly written, but bad as in a discomforting form, in a way that is disturbing as something that makes you think, question the way we live – and this is her best accomplishment.

Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize Award winner “March” has a clever starting. She tells the story that isn’t in the beloved classic “Little Women”; we follow the lives of Mr. March and his wife Mrs. March, known Marmee. Most of the novel deals with the events he facew while he is away in the Civil War.

The little women from Luisa May Alcott’s famous novel hardly make an appearance here. They are briefly mentioned from time to time, but the main character is indeed Mr. March. Flashbacks exploit his early life, when he was already an abolitionist and had problems when was teaching a slave child. We also learn how he met and fell in love with Marmee, and all he had to face when he joined the army.

The second part of the book is mostly narrated by Marmee, this is the period when she has to leave her home and go to the hospital where he is between life and death. For her disappointment, Mrs. March we will discover that her husband has secrets from the past, and she’ll have to come to terms with them if she wants to keep a happy marriage.

Mr. and Mrs. March are two complementary forces. As one character wisely describes, `he lives for the ideas’ and she is the one `left to deal with the practical matters of the life’. In other words he is the one that spends his time dreaming, while his wife is the one worried with material things that keep the family alive and together, like money and food. In this sense, the writer gives us two faces of the same coin of the marriage.

Brooks’s narrative is slow and less exhilarating the Alcott’s, but it is not boring, it requires patience and it is better if the reader is familiar with the novel “Little Women”. The writer has succeeded most of the time in a difficult task that not many contemporary writers do. Since she has two narrators it is vital that they have different voices. And here they do most of the time.

Based on Alcott’s own family, Brooks has created an interesting novel that will certainly appeal fans of “Little Women”. The events and personalities she created to Mr. and Mrs. March make sense to how they brought their children up. This later prequel may not exist in an universe without the other novel, but it is a great complementary read.

Publicado na www.Amazon.com em 01/05/06

In Denis Johnson’s stunning collection of short stories “Jesus’ Son”, there is an image that stays with you most of the time. This is the picture of loneness and desolation. In one of the best tales, called “Emergency”, the main character whose name goes by FH and a friend drive through the country. They eventually find a drive-in. But the weather is awful and there is no one in there - even though there is a movie being played. Johnson’s description of this place is the combination of beauty and sadness.

Since the writer has a natural ability to construct both metaphors and harrowing images the scene is depressive and, at the same time, powerful, uplifting. “Famous movie stars rode bicycles beside a river, laughing out their gigantic, lovely mouths. If anybody had come to see this show, they’d left when the weather started. Not one car remained, not even a broken-down on from last week, or one left here because it was out if gas. In a couple of minutes, in the middle of a whirling square dance, the screen turned black, the cinematic summer ended, the snow went dark, there was nothing but my breath’.

But before this, while FH was riding around this deserted part of the world, he though he saw angels - had a vision. This was just Johnson’s build up for something stronger, a primal screen for the ending of loneness. The narrator is never still, he is always in motion, and no matter where he goes, he is always surrounded by depressed and depressive souls.

The collection title comes from a Lou Reed’s song called “Heroin”. Addiction is part of the narrator’s life - an important part, it brings people close and tear them apart. While trying to recover - without putting much thought on it - readers have a glimpse of a possibility of a better life, of something less sad and depressive. It is a drop of hope in a nightmare ocean of sadness.