Not at all exemplary novels

A young man in Curitiba has only one remedy: drown. Since there's no sea, a barrel of rum will do. But not everyone finds the courage or lucidity for the barrel of rum. Then there's the engagement, being engaged to something or someone, avoiding the nightly drizzle, finding a room with a sofa and a portrait of a dead relative hanging on the wall, drinking the coffee brought by his future mother-in-law, and, on Sundays, there's the sticky provincial dinner. The bride will embroider, sew, do anything with her hands, perhaps a caress. Women will always be sewing, single, married, widowed, old, or young, their fingers will be pricked by needles, until one day the sewing egg will roll from their hands and their heads will fall off forever—no, nothing lasts forever; even with the sewing egg lying on the floor, the neck is a useful target for a knife.

Some time ago, during Dalton Trevisan's debut book, this very same "Novels undda Exemplares," Otto Maria Carpeaux committed, in my view, an excess of critical rigor. Impressed by what he called a "provocation" (the title inspired or counter-inspired by Cervantes), Carpeaux cast reservations on the book. But the very fact that Otto Maria Carpeaux unleashed the full weight of his critical laboratory upon the debutant was already revealing. For in Dalton Trevisan was born the great national short story writer we all admire today. Even in that fierce critique, Carpeaux recognized in Trevisan the "attentive observer of the details of reality." And he pointed out that "perhaps his true vocation is that of a chronicler of everyday life."

This is not the place to delve into the conceptualization of genres. Novel, short story, chronicle—tons of volumes have been written delimiting the portions of each genre, and tons more will be written on the subject. One arrives at a result or no result, but what matters is knowing whether or not the author of a given novel, short story, or chronicle possesses the drive, the hunger of a writer.

Dalton has this hunger—a hunger never satisfied throughout these years in which, from his remote province, he continued to bombard friends and admirers with his short stories, which—at last—received the noble form of a book. And I believe that Dalton Trevisan, alongside this economical and ecumenical José J. Veiga, of Os cavalinhos de platiplanto (The Little Horses of Platypus ), constitutes the best we have in short stories.

These less-than-exemplary novels are, if I'm not mistaken, his first experiments in the genre that would make him famous and respected. Some of his finest moments are here, in this book—and I'll even name "A Velha Querida" and "João Nicolau" as two of his masterpieces. They are two nearly antagonistic experiences. In the first, it's the incisive episode, dense with notations and meanings, an adventure that lasts the space of a visit to the brothel. In the second, it's an entire existence traveled in leaps and bounds, the story of a man almost from cradle to grave. In both, the author displays the same firmness in eliminating the narrative's blind spots and the same precision in choosing the exact target and angle.

Of course, every reader will find their favorite work here. And every critic will have the right to accuse the Curitiba author of a monotonous obsession with the provinces: with the themes, the dramas, the lack of provincial humor. To justify or explain Dalton Trevisan's thematics, Carpeaux cites some modern authors whose company would honor any writer: Sartre, Camilo José Cela, Morávia. In reality, Trevisan fits appropriately into the nauseating line of literature, the line that doesn't use literature to save or accuse humanity, only to bring it closer to our retinas, to show it to ourselves, and, through different planes, through diverse portraits, to confirm that we are just like it, that we ourselves are those eternal provincial brides, those drunken and desperate men of drizzly nights, those slumped rapists of the roadside.

Dalton Trevisan's fidelity to his world had an absurdly logical consequence: fidelity to the genre he chose to communicate this world to us. An example, if not unique, at least rare in any literature. This makes me want to quote Chekhov and Maupassant. But I'm not a critic. As a simple reader, it is my duty to express my respect and admiration for the work of the short story writer from Paraná, certain that his presence in our literature marks one of the purest and most beautiful moments of our literary era.

- Carlos Heitor Cony