An emotional mistake

"(...) true pleasure, what gives meaning to life, is conquest, the more difficult the better; and once we have our prize before us, a nice slice of pizza, we go in search of another," Beatriz smiled at the idiotic comparison, "but what I'm imagining now," she mused, "is what I read in some silly women's magazine, not what I might discover from this writer, perhaps sunk in a small crisis of shyness, three feet from my face..." Paulo and Beatriz. A writer and his reader. It all begins with a declaration, a truncated sentence that says: "I made an emotional mistake." The dialogue that follows this confession insinuates, more than it actually reveals, a delve into the memories—be they fragile family situations or failed romantic relationships—that inhabit the characters' minds. In the few words exchanged between glasses of wine and sips of tea, one senses the presence of the unsaid and of what remains unsaid. At 42 years of ill-lived life, the writer dreams of finally finding a woman willing to guide him. And Beatriz, a stranger, now finds herself confronted by the very author she had learned to love through books, a mixture of admiration, idealization, and, above all, a lack of intimacy. Through Tezza's precise and captivating diction, we are invited to witness the characters' conversation from a privileged vantage point. Driven by desire but paralyzed by fear, Paulo and Beatriz become accomplices. In the silences, the fencing of feelings gropes for the word that redeems: "Love is a feeling necessarily filled with shadows. Or is it passion that is dark?" "Tezza's text is emotional, but it is not one that only appeals to emotion (...). What we have here is the mature literature of a talented writer, undoubtedly one of the most important contemporary Brazilian writers." Leandro Oliveira, Le monde diplomatique "(...) the endless game of masks is how one could define the shifting universe of Cristovão Tezza. In an extraordinarily eloquent style, attentive to outpourings, he rises with seriousness and conviction that literature is responsible for rescuing who we are, beyond good and evil." Lênia Márcia Mongelli, O Estado de S. Paulo "Tezza's world is inhabited by characters who are constantly searching for a way out." "(...) what emerges from these sometimes intricate plots are precisely the ghosts and shadows – making Cristovão Tezza a writer who, without falling into the artificialities of metalinguistic prose, shows how the world of fiction can correct and overcome the narrowness of the real world." Manuel da Costa Pinto, Literatura brasileira hoje (Publifolha) "Cristovão Tezza is the critic-writer responsible for elevating the Brazilian novel to a new level." Rosane Pavam, Carta Capital