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Inventário das sombras is the result of more than two decades of interviews conducted by writer and journalist José Castello with leading figures in Brazilian and world literature. This new edition, in addition to the portraits of great authors that comprised the first version of the book, includes two previously unpublished portraits and a self-portrait of the writer of literary portraits.
José Castello, writer and journalist, was always impressed by the abandonment of writers, by the loneliness of authors tormented by the readings that influence them, and he was especially interested in the dark zones in which these artists wage their battles, by the small tortures imposed by the market and critics, by the demands of vanity, by the madness, in short, that takes over men and women when they face the blank page, leaving in the background the sophisticated and elegant images that the media constructs about artists.
In this new edition of Inventário das sombras (Inventory of Shadows ), the author paints sixteen portraits of great writers: Clarice Lispector, João Antônio, Caio Fernando Abreu, Allain Robbe-Grillet, Hilda Hilst, Manoel de Barros, Nelson Rodrigues, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Raduan Nassar, Ana Cristina Cesar, José Saramago, Dalton Trevisan, José Cardoso Pires, João Rath, and Arthur Bispo do Rosário. Added to these are two previously unpublished portraits of Raimundo Carrero and João Gilberto Noll, as well as the text in which Castello dedicates himself to the difficult task of speaking about himself and the behind-the-scenes nature of portraying others.
Beyond the works of those portrayed, Castello focuses on their intimate conflicts, their disappointments, their difficult feelings, the horrors, the twilight zone of literary creation, and he does this not out of perversion or because he desires to invert values, but rather because he prefers to focus on the difficult and unglamorous moments of writing, but more expressive of their personalities and personal phantasmagorias.
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