The invention of crime

The reinvention of literature in The Invention of Crime. In Libya, an arms dealer doesn't understand why he's being excluded from the scheme. In Romania, a prosecutor can no longer investigate opium trafficking and the death of a poet. In Rio de Janeiro, a killer can't even enter a house, even though the locksmith comes to change the lock a few times. Other strange stories follow, and for now, the main character of THE INVENTION OF CRIME, journalist Leida Reis's first novel, hasn't even appeared. Little by little, the pieces begin to fit together. This man, called the Hero, is a consummate specialist in erasing the traces left by a person from birth, until he reaches the person themselves and removes them from circulation. He didn't kill, he destroyed identities. That's how it was until, as a result of an event that will become clear later, the Hero kills for the first time. In the last fragment, the book's largest, a writer, in first-person narration, provides information that completes the pieces of the puzzle. More than a detective novel, THE INVENTION OF CRIME is a tribute to literature. Leida Reis's book contains references to Russians, Brazilians, and, above all, to the craft of writing itself, to the writer's search for character. And he does anything to fulfill his role. A novel composed of several fragments that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Each fragment focuses on a character in a specific place in the world, caught up in a situation that is, to say the least, unusual: somehow, the character's identity is "erased" from the very universe in which he lives. There are the famous AK-47 rifles, the Bulava missiles; the Complexo do Alemão, Paulista Avenue, crack cocaine. But to this, let's say, factual knowledge, the author combines a vast culture and, above all, a reflection that goes beyond everyday events, delving deeper into the human condition itself, as seen in the final chapter, which begins with a psychoanalytic reflection on Dostoevsky. It's a meditation on narrative itself, on the act of creation: "I write because I have a habit of investigating people's lives, and there was nothing to do with the discoveries."