The Portuguese writer Afonso Reis Cabral, on May 6 in Barcelona.Joan Sanchez
“I am my brother's guardian”, says, with Cainite resonances, the anonymous narrator who surprises the family and decides now, after the death of his parents, to commit himself and take care of his consanguineous, 40 years old and with Down syndrome .
But it is a not very reliable narrator that of
My brother
(Acantilado, translation by Isabel Soler), LeYa 2014 award. This first novel, which is now published in Spanish, pointed to a surprising 24-year-old Afonso Reis Cabral as one of the most suggestive voices of the new Portuguese narrative, a fact that the second,
Sugar Loaf
(2019 Saramago award, which will also be published by Acantilado), has ratified.
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From this book you can see Portugal
The hour of Portuguese literature
Yes, shocking, but the chronicler is jealous of Miguel, who, despite his illness, is sure of what he wants, falls passionately in love, has ideals ... The antithesis of the cult brother, university professor, divorced, misanthrope, who responds with a disturbing spiral between love and hatred, always with a very high substrate of bitterness and resentment. “The storyteller's game is to show and hide, he has a conscience at times and at other times, no; but he is a moral storyteller because he clearly thinks about what he is doing: he is torn between helping his brother or seeking his own redemption in the face of his empty life, and when that does not go well, the supposed honesty of every brother falters ”, assures Reis Cabral ( Lisboa, 31 years old) on a morning in early May in Barcelona.
The bitter and twisted internal battle of the narrator and the well-profiled behavior of Miguel surprise us thinking that Reis Cabral began the novel when he was 21 years old, now a decade ago. His biography explains it in part: he has a brother who suffers from the disease. “My commitment is with literature, not with the autobiographical; but yes, it is still an exorcism of mine; writing, deep down, always is; I have a dark side that I keep in a box and that box is the book ”, he admits with a frank smile on a bearded face that seems to contradict the statement. A phrase from the book ("We live like bags of rotten meat, tightly closed and attached, but dying inside") and a rationale clear up doubts: "The narrator realizes that he has failed to find happiness and feels shaken by check that Miguel is born wounded,but more predisposed to that happiness and that makes the gap deeper ”. It is summarized by another phrase in the book: “For Miguel it was enough to exist; the rest of us had to fight ”.
We are at a time when reading seems to be good or not if you are in a book, if you can identify yourself, and that is dangerous
The idea
flows underground in
My brother
that what is closest to us is always what betrays us ... or the first thing that betrays and hates itself.
It also occurs in
Sugar Loaf
, where the real case of the murder of a transsexual by violent teenagers, alleged friends of the victim, is narrated.
“Knowing something or someone in depth allows us to be able to hurt them more accurately;
we can do much more harm to those we know;
my work is still a disguised attack: the family is many things, but also a daily struggle ”.
He stops and summarizes: "Yes, maybe I like to explore how closeness and empathy often turn into something very different."
The inspiration of a fadista
Reis Cabral's precocity is even more chilling if it is known that he published his first book, the poems of
Condensação
, when he was 15 years old. If a man, as he says in
My brother
, also measures himself in everyday things, the spark that led him to writing must have been remarkable. "I am also a doubtful narrator about myself," he deviates in the first instance. "The honest answer is that it was a coincidence: I was nine years old when the fado singer Amalia Rodrigues, voice of the great Portuguese poets, passed away, and I needed to answer that ... I remember opening a folder on the computer with the title
Alter ego
because I always approached poetry like a little theater, it was not confessional at all, scarcely autobiographical: I remember having reflected a childhood anguish that I never experienced;
poetry, for me, was a first stage for prose;
It's already closed".
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Amália Rodrigues, fado of the resistance
The laugh of Eça de Queiroz
There is another answer to his early literary drive: the remarkable family library of some "great readers" parents. And maybe something genetic when one is a great-great-grandson of the great classic Eça de Queirós. "His realism is very specific, I do not think it resembles mine," ditch. He is more comfortable when he is referred to Vergílio Ferreira in that making pain feel when reading, squeezing emotions without falling into sentimentality. “My themes may seem Manichean, banal; but precisely the writing must have total animosity to banality: it always does an ugly service to the subject and I think I flee from that. "
Freelance
editor
, Reis Cabral admits that Portuguese literature had lost "in the last 20 years" part of its essences (memory, childhood, family space ...) in order to seek "a supposed universal setting, it occurs even in the fundamental
Essay on blindness
, by José Saramago ”, he exemplifies. Critics say that he has recovered them with a modern language, very visual, with phraseology as short as poetic, as collected by
My Brother
. "That supposed universality costs me, perhaps because I lack imagination: I make my novels by consulting Google Maps and going out into the street, which makes the time stamp visible in my work."
Thus is the writer opposed to Gonçalo M. Tavares and Valter Hugo Mae, with whom he is quoted when talking about the new Portuguese narrative. “They build in a different way from mine, but I follow them because I like to grow by contrasts: we are at a time when reading seems to be good or not if one is in a book, if one can identify and that is dangerous: to go towards yourself is the opposite of literature, which is the experience of discovery, ”he says. He is also aware that Spain lives with its back to Portuguese literature: "I will give it a white glove slap: we are very attentive to Spanish literature, which we translate almost simultaneously."
"When the crisis has another name, each one of us will survive in his own way, each one more damaged than the other", it is said in
My brother
, with reference to the effects of the 2008 crash. It could now be applied to the one generated by the pandemic. "We will see if we will be able to get out of all this economically, but the worrying thing is that the Covid-19 is seen as a punishment for our globalizing sins and that reading is magical thinking, has something medieval, and I think it is dangerous or , to say the least, disturbing ”. Like the Cainite brother.