Set against the backdrop of the pandemic, Lanterns to Nirvana is a cutting-edge book that combines narrative, poetry, and dramatic text.
Felipe Franco Munhoz's debut book, Mentiras (2016), received comments, for example, from the writer Raimundo Carrero – “Great, beautiful and courageous book. Lessons in dialogue” – and from the poet and translator Paulo Henriques Britto – “Beautiful work of metafiction”.
Regarding Franco Munhoz's next book, Identidades (2018), Caetano Veloso said he was "fascinated": "A book so short, I thought it would be read in one sitting. But it's poetry—and poetry isn't short if the book is short. I've never found anything like it among the things young people give me to look at. [...] Even the scene-setting headings are poetry. [...] Identidades has a unique place in contemporary Brazilian literature."
In 2022, Franco Munhoz once again transforms pages into stages—or stages into pages?—to forge and stage Lanterns to Nirvana . Interweaving poetry and drama, the author continues to explore light and shadow: reflected both in the minutiae of human beings and in the expansion of language.
The book's setting is the pandemic world between March 2020 and January 2021. Each text is accompanied by a date, indicating the exact day the text in question began. The poem "Segundo andar: defronte, estou" opens the book with a certain innocence, with a naive gaze that seeks out small things, details in the confinement; a gaze that, in a way, was incapable of comprehending the dimension of the near future.
While narrative arcs are revealed, in a certain sense, and fictional characters and refrains appear, Lanterns to Nirvana also reveals creative backstage: created during the author's radical social isolation (a full 312 days of isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic), each section of the book presents the date it began being written – posing the reader the question: were there transformations in style and ideas influenced by time and confinement itself?
Lanterns to Nirvana is a fragmented book: each fragment reveals itself as both a piece of the puzzle and an independent body. It's possible that it's the same abyss the author has already visited, but perhaps the fall, this time, is a little shorter and, paradoxically, a little deeper.
"'Parêntesis' [part of Lanterns to Nirvana ] is stupendous. So vivid and visual. It reads like a movie in the mind." - Liz Calder
"A dialogue in the quarantine cave to the sound of Miles Davis, 'Parêntesis' is steep – with the opacity characteristic of Felipe Franco Munhoz's texts, which always leave us stunned." - Manuel da Costa Pinto
"It reads like Philip Roth's Deception : except it's about true love; and the intertextual references to Miles Davis and Plato make it a kind of treasure hunt. As poetic as it is philosophical, 'Parenthesis' could also be read as a long, successful poem." - Aimee Pozorski
“'Until the Night' [part of Lanterns to Nirvana ] is not just a beautiful poem, it is a chilling prophecy.” - José Castello
