If there is one thing that is well portrayed in Brazilian literature, it is the discouraging, corrosive and even oppressive influence of an environment that represents the antithesis of any higher aspiration. The unfortunate who experiences it in this environment often finds himself crushed by a multiplicity of factors that not only exceed him in strength, but seem to work ceaselessly to ensure that he never breaks free. The most dramatic thing about this situation is that it does not just take a gigantic force of will to overcome it, but that it must be constant: a single weakening, a single giving way of the spirit and the whole of the said multiplicity of factors will reveal itself with maximum power, pulling him down. To resist it, it seems, one has to be more than just a man.
If the Future of Paper Books Seems Uncertain…
If the future of paper books seems uncertain, not to say that their days are certainly numbered, we cannot help but proceed to imagine libraries as relics of a distant past. Forming and maintaining them, therefore, would only be done by collectors. This simple fact, although it masks the range of facilities that modernity has given to the average reader, cannot inspire good feelings. A book as an antique… What to say?
Not Even the Most Deeply Ingrained Habit…
The truth has to be told: not even the most deeply ingrained habit can resist the real and unequivocal advantages that these modern electronic devices offer to reading when compared to a physical book. A single test is enough. The flexibility of reading positions, the possibility of customizing fonts and spacing, the need to pay no attention to external lighting and, above all, the tremendous, incomparable ease with which one can highlight passages, make notes and send them, ready-made, to a computer, where they can be instantly located in case of future need. This is undoubtedly something that goes far beyond habit: it is the possibility of reducing a monstrous amount of work, both in organization and in future research. Dozens of minutes effectively turned into seconds. Not embracing the novelty, therefore, is unwise. So there’s no question of predicting an uncertain future at best for paper books. So what?
Perhaps the Most Intricate Problem Facing…
Perhaps the most intricate problem facing Brazilian novelists is whether or not to portray colloquial language. Assuming this necessity, there is the very complicated problem of measurement, for which there seems to be no sure solution. That is to say: the gulf between the Portuguese spoken in Brazil and the cultured language is so immense, but so immense, that there is no possible conciliation, but rather tolerable, or perhaps necessary betrayals, which are interspersed in the chosen model. Cultured language, compared to colloquial language, is artificiality and ridicule in Brazilian Portuguese. Colloquial language, on the other hand, does not fit into formal Portuguese except as an infinite set of spelling, prosodic and syntactic errors, which, if portrayed faithfully, make the language almost unrecognizable. How, then, to solve it? The novelist, if he really sees the situation he is narrating, will naturally feel restrained from putting into the mouth of a character a speech that is inconceivable to him. At the same time, he is a novelist, not a speaker; he therefore handles—and hopefully loves—the written language and tradition. From all this, there is only one certainty: the easiest thing is not to be a novelist in Brazil.