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.
There Is a Piece of Advice That Would…
There is a piece of advice that would please readers very much, but has never been given to any writer, and it consists of the following: the author whose pages of the books he has are not enough to satisfy his need to comment on them does well to allocate the excess, or the whole of his comments to a work designed specifically for this purpose. By doing so, he avoids, firstly, these comments getting in the way of a narrative that has nothing to do with them, interrupting it and hindering it. Secondly, if such a work exists, it will be good for the author himself, who will have a stimulating store of comments in it, if he does not have a friend or any other real person to perform this function.
The Advantage of a Novel With a Well-Defined…
The advantage of a novel with a well-defined dramatic arc, even if the succession of events, being exaggeratedly cohesive, borders on artificiality, is that it keeps the sense of the whole alive and intense in the reader’s mind, something that, in short, sustains his interest. On the other hand, novels that are, say, more “natural”, that reflect the natural futility of the characters and the natural triviality of their lives and concerns, quickly become tedious and, even if they appear less forced, often they do not resist the constant temptation to close them.