Which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject.
ADAM MORRISI am surprised by the word psychedelic. João Gilberto Noll does not accept realism in a straightforward way, but I am more inclined to call Quiet Creature a realist text than I am to call it a psychedelic one.
More Adam Morris Quotes
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Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers
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I don’t think there’s anything that I would call essentially Brazilian in João Gilberto Noll work. In that regard, it translates very well to a cosmopolitan audience.
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An easy example would be the Portuguese escuridão:
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I am not one of those translators who think that working closely with the writer will yield the best translation.
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The Brazilian national identity is not one of João Gilberto Noll primary concerns. This does not mean social critique is absent: race, gender, and class relations are considered in Quiet Creature.
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This makes his writing very pleasing to read: João Gilberto Noll pays attention to detail, but only to certain details. And it’s never easy to foresee which details will send the narrator or the plot in an unsuspected direction.
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This neglect of a very important Brazilian writer is, in my view, the result of Brazil’s relative isolation from what metropolitan tastemakers.
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The main reason I decided to study Latin American literature was because I’d gotten somewhat bored by the American fiction I was reading. I am not drawn to a specific style or aesthetic.
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Jorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers
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And these are universal relational matters, not necessarily particular to any country.
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One of my methods for developing my own voice in fiction, a process I am taking very slowly and deliberately, is through these very intense encounters with certain writers.
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Some critics have commented that understanding the specific Brazilian political context of the novel is helpful for reading Quiet Creature. This may be true, but it’s not prerequisite for understanding it.
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Strength and power in fiction is being able to resist these intoxicating voices, recognizing that they are the signatures of other writers and not one’s own.
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When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily – English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
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Borges, in part to legitimize his own Europhilia, correctly pointed out that expecting writers to engage with these romantic nationalist tropes was arbitrary and limiting, a genre that was demonstrative of its own artificiality.
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