Tag: literature

The first time I read Crime and punishment, it took me two days to finish the 590 pages of my edition. It was unprecedented for me to read a book with such voracity. I remember that on a rainy Saturday, I started reading around 4 p.m.; when the sun came at 6 a.m. on Sunday, I was still with the book in my hands. Censored by the sun, I chose to sleep a few hours. When I woke up, I took the reading session that would shoot the book. But why my delight? What is so special about this book? It was Crime and punishment my first contact with Dostoevsky: I had never read any author who approached his psychological acuity. Reading Crime and Punishment I felt physically in Russia; I felt, terrified, a murderer and I felt, in curse, beset by guilt. For the first time I articulated and validated in mind nihilistic thoughts, which shone in an undeniable logic and showed me the relativity of morality. Pages later, all this falls apart, and Raskolnikov leads me with him to the abyss. Feverish, delirious, makes me feel on my skin the tension of guilt, the fear of persecution. And in the midst of darkness, desperate and repentant, he teaches me what redemption is; together with Sonia, he teaches me what is the flesh and what is the soul; and condemned, he teaches me the true value of things on earth. I closed the book decided: whatever happens, I am going to be a writer.

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Read more:

• Crítica e profecia: a filosofia da religião em Dostoiévski, by Luiz Felipe Pondé
• The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Quincas Borba, by Machado de Assis
• The Contingency in Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I closed this brilliant work disgusted by the outcome of the plot. I thought, “How will this book resonate in me in the future?” I reflected on the reading: from the beginning, I was delighted with the sharpness and precision of the psychological descriptions of the misanthrope, self-destructive and depressing Harry Haller, who seemed to me as a brother. The narrative develops instigating, seeing Harry sprout, through a woman — Hermine, — his human side, then facing a fierce psychological battle because of his ambivalent personality. Psychological tension is constant, and Harry’s reflections are noteworthy. Comes the book summit, where Harry looks in delirium. I felt, shortly before, the physical presence of Goethe and Mozart, evoked by the author. I am not moved at all with what might be called the climax of the plot — or, if you prefer, with what immediately happens after the climax. A few pages later, I close the book: “What then? What will I remember in the future?” It has been some months: I can barely remember the outcome; the rest of the book, however, remains alive in me.

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Read more:

• My Maternal Great-grandfather
• Nietzsche and The Impotence of Language
• Ulysses, by James Joyce
• História de Dom Pedro II, by Heitor Lyra

First, the specialist; then the amateur. Let’s see some of Otto Maria Carpeaux’s comments about the book and the author, in my translation:

Jonathan Swift — a humanist cleric, faithful-unfaithful to the Church of which he was a priest —is one of the greatest satirists of universal literature, perhaps the greatest of all. Gulliver’s Travels is the cruelest book there is. Lilliput’s warp and useless activities ridicule parliamentary life in 18th-century England and in all countries and times of constitutional and professional politics. Sketching this political landscape, Swift remembered his pamphleteer times in the service of the Conservative Party, the Tories; it’s a scathing satire against the Whigs. But soon after, Swift describes the patriarchal regime in the kingdom of Brobdingnag giants; and this is nothing better. On the contrary, the size of the giants grotesquely makes all the details enormous, that is, the infamy of the “conservative classes”. Nor are the intellectuals who, in the country of Laputa, vegetate as complete imbeciles. In the last part, the praise of the Houyhnhms, that is, the horses, nobler and smarter than men, is the absolute condemnation of the human race in totum. Finally, the episode of the Struldbrugs, which owe scientific progress to the immortality of life, not escaping, but to the diseases, weaknesses and senility of extreme old age, and who cannot die, already condemns life itself. The countless spirited and biting digressions — the description of the horrors of war as if they were the most natural things in the world, the mockery of Christian dogmas and rites, incredible in the mouth of a high dignitary of the Church — reveal in Swift the most radical representative rationalism in Illustration; not even Voltaire dared so much.

There are Carpeaux’s lucid words — and there are many more of them about Swift in História da Literatura Universal (vol. 2). — For my part, I say this: Gulliver’s Travels was perhaps the book that marked me the most. I always come back to it, reread excerpts, and have it throbbing in me. When I write and, for a moment, I think I am exaggerating in my judgments, I think of Swift. I remember Nelson Rodrigues once said that fiction, to purify, needs to be atrocious. According to this reasoning, few books purify as much as Gulliver’s Travels; and I share the trial. Swift’s “great soul, noble and wound” — still using Carpeaux’s words —can impregnate us with deep discomfort and revulsion towards our nature; however, no doubt, it ends up making us better people.

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Read more:

• Certainties
• Life As It Is, by Nelson Rodrigues
• The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe
• Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse