And regarding your use of the theatrical in the novel, Masukichi, the kyogen actor, is only one of the many “actors.” Some of the key spaces in the novel are described as theater sets: Setsuko’s house in São Paulo, where the narrator hears the first installments of the story which is itself fake, unreal, inauthentic and the city of São Paulo itself, whose most authentic trait, according to the narrator, is its “vontade de passar pelo que não é”-it wants to pass for something it is not.īernardo Carvalho One of the book’s principal ideas is that things can only be as long as they are not they can exist only before they are named.

The narrator himself pretends to be a writer, which he is not. Feigning and acting are associated with the novel’s characters and spaces.

Natalia Brizuela O sol se põe em São Paulo (The Sun Sets in São Paulo), your most recent novel, is preoccupied with people who try to pass as someone else and things that try to pass themselves off as other things. Petersburg, then Moscow-where he spent a month working on his latest novel-and, lastly, São Paulo. I remained in California while he was first in St. This interview took place over the months of September and October, via email. Frustrated writers, voracious readers, characters out of place, secrets or codes to be discovered and revealed, disappearing worlds, are only some of the recurrent tropes in his writing. Literature, for him, comes not from a comfort zone but rather a minefield. He travels in order to step outside of himself completely when beginning to write. Carvalho travels, then, not to use literature as a document, but to secure, through the allure of the word, the unfailing strength of invention.

Which is of course completely paradoxical because his writing method-at least since his 2002 novel Nove Noites (Nine Nights), the book that secured his success and visibility both at home and internationally-is to travel to those places where his novels will be set: the heartland of Brazil, Mongolia, Japan, and, recently, Russia. At a time when much Brazilian literature is marked by its contamination with “facts” and “reality,” Bernardo insists on the power that literature and fiction derives, first and foremost, from its uselessness. His writing might very well represent the end of the line, in Brazil and abroad, of what he himself considers the declining modernist tradition. But more than that, what astounds the reader is Carvalho’s relentless commitment to literature. Bernardo Carvalho appeared on the Brazilian literary scene in 1993 with Aberração (Aberration), a collection of short stories that was followed by a steady stream of eight novels.

Nove Noites by Bernardo Carvalho