The Origins – Lima Barreto
Raphus Press 2017
“With a unusual essay by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel”
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When I read this, my thoughts may appear in the comment stream below…
“The rot, however, had its nuances,…”
A portrait of family man’s sense of rot’s reek and how it had changed – or rather not changed – throughout his life: childhood crossroadkill, Christ’s cross killing, the sugar plantation work, and now his own inferred death within sound of his wife and children. Yet while computers can recreate virtually anything only words such as these can truly create such reek in the word-textured mind as well as in the virtual nose, even more so than a real reek.
“…unique aromas, pungent moments, variations.”
“Because I was a believer in my hopeless inability to deal with ladies of all sorts,…”
and my inability to grasp this text, the first defeat in my life of real-time reviewing. It was as if I understood every word without understanding anything it said when strung together. A sort of sickness in itself. I understood his unease with women, his determination not to fit the logic of generational nature and not to take on the faults of his forebears, and his stubbornness or anti-ideals in his education and the ‘folded paper’ qualification. Clutching at straws. And the pension hotel when he eventually meets the girl his dying wife once or later told him to develop into words. Or was that very girl his wife when younger? I shall never know. A word-sickness at last. I need to experience such an origin of my senile dementia before this dementia fully takes over and erases itself from my knowledge of it as dementia. Too late, perhaps, as I reread what I have just written about such origins. Origin after origin as if they never were. Yes, too late.