With unpublished short stories and a fragment of an unfinished novel, the texts in Natural Education deal with themes dear to the author, such as the tragic aspect of existence, the possibilities of transfiguration of the body, and gender issues.
Natural Education , by João Gilberto Noll, is composed of previously unpublished texts by the author, who died in 2017, found in a computer archive: 26 short stories and a fragment of an unfinished novel. The texts address situations deeply rooted in Noll's writing, such as the tragic aspect of life and the possibilities of bodily transfiguration, poetically portraying characters who are perpetually adrift, lost, forgotten, or eager to forget.
In one narrative, a man enters a woman's house in the middle of the night to recapture the memory of a missing friend; in another, a tormented man agonizes on the dirty floor of a public restroom, reminiscing about his unwanted glory. In these posthumous texts, edited by Edson Migracielo, everything seems to hang in the balance, between delirium and pleasure, between life and extinction.
Regarding Noll's work, Migracielo asks: "aren't those dispositions—bizarre, vital, and rebellious—precisely the ones that become revolutionary, the ones that awaken creations and productions in culture that point to what the world has not yet been and unleash, in the world, its yet?
This volume, which brings together previously unpublished material, but preserved and organized with care for publication, as well as the emergence of an unfortunately unfinished novel, represents an exultant reunion, perhaps the last, with the literature of an essential author and a pioneer in the treatment of gender issues in Brazilian literature.
