Marital war

The vampire of souls.

"Thirty short stories, all short, in which all the men are John, all the women, Mary. It's a kaleidoscope with the same colored glass that only changes position and relationship, trapped in the personal Hell of solitude as a couple. The stupendous, the marvelous thing about Dalton Trevisan's succinct stories is his acute capture of all the popular myths, the clichés: ""now I was a married woman and couldn't talk to just any man"" or ""I always tried to bring comfort to the home. I never cared about expense."" They are the continuous barrage of the war of the sexes, this ""domestic Iliad"" as the Curitiba-born writer himself calls it.

Dalton Trevisan's greatness lies in giving Brazilian urban literature perhaps the most unusual and poignant Kitsch Selections ever assembled in the Americas. Dalton Trevisan collects taboos and popular ideals and presents the reader with a yellowed album of tacky photographs and postcard poses colored with glitter. When a husband attacks his cheating wife before his very eyes, the Latin melodrama wavers between laughter and tears: ""The lover rushed in furiously, the woman on her knees announced the fruit of her womb."" An entire subculture of Leonardo da Vinci's "Holy Supper," silver, enthroned over the dinner table, springs from this phrase; It is all the Catholic iconography in bad taste, of Virgins fainting before the Announcement made by the Angel, reproduced in penny prints that emerges in the popular mind and that the author with wisdom and perfect dosage collects and embeds in his network of everyday life that always touches on the metaphysical.

The banal always contains a desire to surpass itself that often leads to a transcendence of the prosaic itself. Only apparently is Dalton Trevisan a naturalist: when João misses the Maria he used to torment, he mixes his anguish with the practical-disgusting aspect: "If it wasn't her, who would squeeze the pimples on his back?"

Curitiba, sister to Joyce's Dublin, is that long journey of a writer scrutinizing his city from within, in its sublime or cruel motivations, monstrous social injustices and dedications of a heroic fidelity never rewarded, of dreams nurtured by women's magazines, by saccharine radio programs and lying horoscopes, Capricho and Ilusão that reveal themselves to be sordid and macabre realities.

Dalton Trevisan doesn't just record this cornucopia of unsatisfied lechery, of husbands fearful of being murdered with ground glass in their food by the partners they martyr. He does more: he fully adheres to the superstitions and moral codes of his characters. There's no distancing in his narrative: it's about us, it's about himself that he speaks, it's about his self-inspected condition that he writes. Modestly, he would consider himself the last poster boy in his city's central square, when his entire splendid gallery of short stories proves, book after book, that he is the subtlest and most porous of all portraitists. He is the photographer who identifies with the grotesqueness of his subjects, the rococo of their poses reflected in the rococo of their rhetorical phrases, capsules of the commonplace.

The admirable author of Death in the Square, Conjugal War, Elephant Cemetery, The Vampire of Curitiba, and The Bird with Five Wings doesn't fit the schematic label of "a moralist." And with the exception of the Marquis de Sade, what writer isn't a moralist in his own way? (And perhaps even the Divine Marquis possesses an ethical coherence imperceptible by normal standards). Dalton Trevisan seems like a literary incarnation of Bosch: his concerns are all religious, his stories always lead to the cardinal sins: advance, lust, pride, envy. The greatest reward of these puzzles posed by the author lies in their mystery and the multiplicity of their interpretations.

Is Dalton Trevisan a Dante who crossed limbo or a Lazarus who passed through spiritual death? Rare in any literature are the authors who formulate to the reader's astuteness perennial riddles about man, the eternal executioner of those who love him. With Dalton Trevisan, finally, seeking these riddles isn't synonymous with finding them in foreign texts. They are there, published, in every bookstore, perhaps even orderable by mail order? They are snapshot albums of the Brazilian, a being universalized by the perfect style of this "vampire of souls" and radiologist of the psyche of this people made up of loving and unloved Johns and Marthas. Leo-Gílson Ribeiro