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João Almino masterfully brings together the protests of the Spanish indignados with the Brazilian demonstrations of June 2013, in this Enigmas of Spring .
Enigmas of Spring updates the most widely read love story in Arabic literature, originally recorded in verse by the Persian poet Nizami in the 12th century. In João Almino's story, young Majnun falls in love with Laila, a married woman fifteen years his senior. Unable to experience this love, Majnun searches, confused and insatiable, for answers to his weaknesses and delusions. He spends his days writing a novel and an essay on tolerance in Islam. Absorbed in his reading, he blends fiction and reality in his relationship with medieval Spain. Wherever he goes in Brasília, he encounters his obsession with Laila and his existential doubts, nearly driving him mad. Suspected of the murder of Laila's husband, he sees a trip to Spain during World Youth Day 2011 as an opportunity for escape. There, he learns more about religion, faith, and politics.
"A candid and profound reflection on the lack of alternatives, this book is also about reason, which, combined with imagination, creates solutions. Not the abstract and omnipotent reason capable of promoting horror, but a reason that seeks to test the world and learn, in the perennial struggle between tolerance and intolerance.
The quixotic pace of the narrative, the books that are inscribed within the book, the failed hero, religion and faith, the East and the West, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, Brazil and the world, everything is condensed in this novel in which youth and politics join hands, as if to remember that, not so long ago, the impossible still seemed necessary and urgent.
Faced with the most dubious springs, the protagonist searches, confused and insatiable, for the horizon that comforts, but which insists on remaining distant. This is a book about the theft of utopia, and therefore about our time. But it is also, in the end, a high and resounding bet on the rebirth of hope. Enigmas of Spring, in short, is about the time when the future and desire meet, with the writer as the sole and anguished witness.
- Pedro Moreira Monteiro, who signs the book's blurb.
"A book about the theft of utopia, and therefore about our time. But also, in the end, a high and resounding bet on the rebirth of hope. Pedro Meira Monteiro It's hard to imagine a bolder aesthetic achievement for a renowned author." - João Cezar de Castro Rocha
"It highlights your ability to keep the narrative thread very secure." - Alcir Pécora
""When reading João Almino and a few others, I feel that Brazilian literature remains alive and effervescent."" - Ignácio de Loyola Brandão
"It produces a real spell effect." - Sébastien Lapaque, Le Figaro Littéraire
"It is the migrant voices that João Almino's keen ear has been surprising. He captures them with his relentless novelistic kodak." -Silviano Santiago
"A smart and moving account of loss and love that confirms Almino's place as one of Brazil's greatest living novelists." - Brendan Driscoll, Booklist
"A novel of intensities, of passionate encounters, for both the narrator and the reader." - Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
"When the reader comes to his senses, he has been swallowed." - Walnice Nogueira Galvão
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