Leituras ortogonais

Semana passada eu tive a oportunidade de ler duas obras de ficção daquelas que dá vontade de ler no colo sentado à frente do monitor no trabalho (não que eu faria isso!)...

No gênero crime, li o The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (título da versão americana, que li), traduzido corretamente para o português como Homens que Não Amavam as Mulheres (em sueco, Män som hatar kvinnor) do falecido escritor sueco Stieg Larsson. É um thriller de umas 500 páginas, ambientado em uma Suécia soturna e violenta.

No gênero como-eu-gostaria-de-escrever-assim, li o genial Nazi Literature in the Americas (para a crítica do New York Times, link aqui) de outro escritor falecido, o grande Roberto Bolaño. O livro é uma coleção de verbetes biográficos hilários sobre gênios literários nazistas fictícios, em sua maioria patéticos perdedores e românticos incompreendidos, como o grande autor guatemalteco Gustavo Borda:

Guatemala's most talented and unfortunate science-fiction writer (...) Borda preferred blondes, and his insatiable libido was legendary, provoking innumerable jokes and jeers. Given the ease with which he fell in love and took offense, his life was a long series of indignities, which he endured with the fortitude of a wounded beast (...) (h)is mere existence, in short, brought the basest, most deeply hidden instincts in the people whose paths he crossed, for one reason or another, in the course of his life. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that any of this demoralized him. In his Diaries, he blames de Jews and usurers for everything. Gustavo Borda was just over five feet tall; he had a swarthy complexion, and enormous very white teeth. His characters, by contrast, are tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed. The spaceships that appear in his novels have German names. Their crews are German too. The colonies in space are called New Berlin, New Hamburg, New Frankfurt, New Koenigsberg. His cosmic police dress and behave like SS officers who have somehow managed to survive into the twenty-second century. (...)

Ou então outro gigante da literatura nazi latino-americana, o venezuelano Franz Zwickau (Caracas, 1946-Caracas, 1971):

(...) He published two books of poetry. (...) The second, "The War Criminal's Son" (1967), marked a substantial shift in Zwickau's poetics and, it could be said, in the Venezuelan poetry of the time. A dire, horrifying, badly written book (Zwickau espoused a peculiar theory about the revision of poems, somewhat surprising in a poet who had cut his teeth on sonnets), full of insults, imprecation, blasphemy, completely false autobiographical details, slanderous imputations, and nightmares.

A number of poems are noteworthy:

(...)

- "Concentration Camp," by contrast, is the humorous and at times touching story of Zwickau's life as a child, between the ages of five and ten, in a middle-class neighborhood of Caracas.

(...)

- "The War Criminal's Son," the book's long title poem, is a vigorous and excessive piece, in which Zwickau, bemoaning the fact that he was born twenty-five years too late, gives free rein to his verbal facility, his hatred, his humour, and his unrelieved pessimism. In free verse of a kind rarely seen in Venezuela, the author depicts an appalling, indescribable childhood, compares himself to a black boy in Alabama in 1858, dances, sings, masturbates, lifts weights, dreams of a fabulous Berlin, recites Goethe and Junger, attacks Montaigne and Pascal (whose work he knows well), adopting the voices of an alpine mountaineer, a peasant woman, a German tanker in Peiper’s brigade who was killed in Ardennes in December 1944, and a North American journalist in Nuremberg.

Needless to say, the collection was ignored, perhaps in a deliberate and concerted manner, by the influential critics of the day.

(...)

Posted in: Leituras ortogonais, Roberto Bolaño, Stieg Larsson