o conselho

O texto mais entusiasmante que li nos últimos tempos foi Divine Comedy, de Julian Gough, após conselho do Rui Manuel Amaral.

As writers began moving cautiously away from the theological shore, they still felt the need for a holy book to guide them, to tell them how to write. Aristotle's Poetics provided that. If you wanted to write tragedy or epic, here were the rules. You need not think for yourself. It's particularly sad to see the narrowness of subject matter and style in the pictorial art of the era—Madonna after pink-cheeked Madonna, saint after martyred saint. So much talent, all wasted doing the Renaissance equivalent of Soviet realist art.

And then something astonishing happened: the invention of the novel privatised myth, because the novel, invented after Aristotle, did not have a holy book. The novelist was on his own. Sometimes he's even a she. There were no rules. The chaos of carnival had found its form. The fool's sermon could be published, could live on. All you learned from Rabelais or Cervantes was to mock everything sacred, all that went before. Including them.

Desde "Fail Better" e "Read Better", de Zadie Smith, que não encontrava um texto - o autor chama-lhe "critical theory" - que se lesse tão bem e que, acima de tudo, não pretendesse travestir-se de dogma. Para quem se interesse por comédia, pelo romance e pela narrativa em geral.