An extraordinary European | Culture | EUROtoday

In the midst of the period of Chaos, maybe it’s value reminding you that the human mind consists of a small, moral and rational half (nonetheless very small), and an infinite cerebral backroom, bestial, animal, territorial, loaded with fears, irrationalities, and murderous instincts.

The Portuguese Gonçalo M. Tavares took care of the labyrinths of that again room in The Kingdom (Seix Barral, 2018), a gathering of what he calls his “black books”, the 4 that vary from Jerusalem a Learning to wish within the age of know-how. In all of them, written between 2003 and 2007, we had been already warned that trendy know-how and rationality may serve to justify barbarism.

At the antipodes of The Kingdomwe discover The Neighborhooda gathering of his “kind books”, centered on a loopy and geometric literary Chiado by which we see shopping for bread, storing vacancy in packing containers, and gossiping about Mr. Valéry, Mr. Brecht, Mr. Walser and firm.

One of the widespread factors between the pleased facet of The Neighborhood and the accident of The Kingdom It could be discovered within the ardour for mathematical buildings and the exploration of the on a regular basis. It’s not for nothing that Gonçalo M. Tavares—the 2026 Formentor de las Letras award, as soon as once more the jury has hit the goal—generally has a Perec-esque air resulting from his skill to create fragmented and methodical universes.

One morning in Lisbon – I witnessed the second – ​​they requested him if he was a political author. And Tavares was withering: “Parties don’t interest me, but politics does.” Nor has he messed round in his newest e-book revealed two months in the past, the satirical epic The End of the United States of America. There he examines, together with his fragmentary and philosophical fashion, a civil struggle within the United States that may be fought on that event, not by opposing areas, however merely between the wealthy and the poor. With excessive social inequality, how for much longer will these two lessons of residents proceed to be thought-about as belonging to the “same species”?

And, actually, it’s a pleasure to learn what he has been saying after successful the Formentor. For Tavares, a e-book shouldn’t be one other tv channel, nor a therapeutic massage, neither is it for foolish leisure. That is to say, literature, understood critically, is a technique of creation and seek for fact, which requires constructing a parallel world, of resistance to barbarism, stupidity, violence, one thing like a world that tries, by way of language, to place intelligence first.

Sònia Hernández (of the Formentor jury) advised me yesterday that she is fascinated to see how in Tavares’s world “everything happens in an inconcrete time, when fear accelerates the emergence of truth and everything could happen at any moment or has already happened, in cities of a Europe that is more tired than old, a Europe that advances like a soldier marching along the path that danger is opening.”

I feel it’s the identical hazard that the astonished reader of this extraordinary European author faces.