"
Combining the narrative talent of a good storyteller with a classic plot of love and family, Entre facas, Algodão presents a novel with the mark of João Almino's narrative talent.
"If it's true that every great city only becomes adult when it has novelists to represent it, young Brasília is mature: with works like *Free City *, *The Book of Emotions* , and *Enigmas of Spring *, João Almino has been building a contemporary novelistic landscape that has put the country's capital on the map of Brazilian literary prose. It's not a Brasília of suits and ties, or the official, icy Brasília of political power. João Almino's narrative talent always has a strong grassroots root, uniting the genius of a good storyteller with the backdrop of a city whose essence is still, in fact, the whole of Brazil.
In this film Between Knives and Cotton , we follow the diary of a man who, at age 70, separates from his wife, leaves Taguatinga, and returns to his geographical and mental childhood. As a child, he saw his father murdered ("blood, so much blood"), and feels the void of memory and affection that he needs to restore to give renewed meaning to his life. Living alone, far from his three children, he buys the Riacho Negro farm, the theater of his upbringing, and immerses himself in the ever-attempting and always-impossible mission of recovering the time that was lost.
In the late project, there's the insidious breath and engine of revenge. The instantaneous modernity of those who use WhatsApp and feel at ease on the computer is experienced side by side with the heavy shadow of an archaic and terrifying universe: one must avenge one's father, this inescapable motto of the atavistic culture of violence.
At the same time, it's a classic story of love and family, of fractured feelings. This emotional depth, tempered by direct language and the literary power of orality, recreated with tranquil clarity, gives João Almino's novel its stylistic hallmark of intense narrative lightness—the gift of a text that, through empathy, captivates us from the first to the last page." - Cristovão Tezza
"Besides retirement, I'm going to live off growing corn, beans, and even cotton—an absurd idea, I know, you don't have to tell me. But there's an emotional reason: it reminds me of my childhood. I'll talk about that later, without revealing everything. In fact, instead of the previous sentence, I had written a few lines here that I decided to cross out. If I find the right way to phrase it, I might be able to bring them back in a possible revision. (...)
Looking out the airplane window at the plateaus—is it the Mantiqueira?—I let another being that lived inside me appear, another me I've always fought against. A sad being, with a tender and contented sadness, that relaxes into its own nature. That perhaps wants to find a future in the past, I have to admit. We have no control over what we remember. And what we remember can insist on never leaving, even waking us up in the middle of the night. It can be here or there from what happened.
"
