The Trumpet of the Avenging Angel

"" Close to haiku.

Dalton Trevisan, one might say, possesses a flair for describing everyday situations of the lower middle class, whether urban or rural, whose sweaty hands, kinks, and eternal romantic misadventures form the backdrop, the nucleus from which one of the most original modern short stories springs. In this book, the Paraná-born short story writer returns with his vampires—fat men, maidens, old men, and disillusioned women—already featured in his work. In the speeches naming impressions (drunken macaw, wet bitch, king of the night), places (Hotel Carioca), figures (João, Maria, André), authorities (the doctor, the sergeant), gastronomic preferences (gizzard, heart and sambiquira, delicate cornmeal bread), devotions (Jesus Cristinho, Marian brother) and the taste for diminutives (pink finger, little foot, little goldfinch mouth) ways of sharpening the irony and intensifying the climate of humor and the grotesqueness of reality reappear.

In one of his rare interviews, Trevisan once expressed a desire to remain a short story writer, and, if possible, to increasingly reduce the length of his stories until he reached the perfection of haiku. Apparently, in The Trumpet of the Avenging Angel , his intention also extends to the continuity of themes. The tone of these 19 books is recurrent, circular, as if uniting them in a sequential line from his previous books. The feelings of his characters, drawn with a pincer from the average Brazilian city, with habits and customs embedded in the modest or well-off house, in the farms, farms, and villages, remain enduring. From the plaster elephant on the refrigerator and the mug bearing the inscription "Congratulations" to the red velvet sofa, the Formica set in the living room, the double bed, no one like Dalton to photograph the self-devouring moments of the petite bourgeoisie subjected to their ridicule.

Some people point to repetitiveness in these stories by the author of "Elephant Cemetery ," or a monotonous character, which seems to overwhelm the reader. Or, even, that Dalton's tales are the same, to which the author merely adds new details or situations in each book. If viewed together, however, and studied within a broad sociological framework, these nocturnal stories from Trevisan would form a tragic epic of the everyday life of the lower middle class, a merciless and real romance, and not just of Curitiba, the place where the fiction writer lives and which he chose as the center of his dramas.

The creator of the Curitiba vampire chose grotesque humor, the bouffonnerie, to shape his tales. The legion of scoundrel heroes, kings of libido, anonymous men cultivating the land and demonstrating machismo, old men with thick drool and voracious appetites betray a certain compassion in the short story writer for his characters, victims of stagnation, sexual or economic repression, and a false concept of morality. Broken homes, marital war, maidens sinning in the Curitiba afternoon—all recall other phases and stories by the same Trevisan, who only retells stories with a deliberate purpose: to rehash the moral misery in which certain segments of society, divided by classes and prejudices, live. There is no room for romanticism in his tales.

Reliving memories of this middle-class tragedy—occasionally anointed by the specter of loneliness—instead of repeating itself, the short story writer reiterates human misunderstandings, sexual repression generating perversions, and social instability provoking imbalances. Why does the author need to rename or rename his unusual characters? Hansel and Gretel are quite common around here; they don't need other names. They can be seen in Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Campo Grande, and even Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. All of this is marked by simple, clear language, elliptical to the extreme, ever closer to the haiku intended by the author, which for 20 years has been a fixture in modern Brazilian short stories, in the direct lineage of Machado's humor.

- Jorge de Souza Araújo