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.
ADAM MORRISJorge Luis Borges was lamenting a variety of Orientalism that was used to measure the alleged authenticity of Argentine and Latin American writers in the midcentury.
More Adam Morris Quotes
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So likewise in João Gilberto Noll, readers shouldn’t expect samba and Carnival and football. The Brazilian national identity is not one of his primary concerns.
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Even my editor at Melville House, who championed the project form the outset, told me she was surprised by the response. After this, editors began asking my opinion about which Latin American writers ought to be translated.
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Dreamlike sequencing is perhaps one of João Gilberto Noll’s most remarkable triumphs in Quiet Creature on the Corner.
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Which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject.
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Reading across three languages is a way for me to diversify my intake as a reader, not to tunnel into certain categories or demographics.
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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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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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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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The Argentine literary tradition was believed by many, including many Argentines, to be concerned with a national imaginary in which the gauchos and the pampas and the tango were fundamental tropes.
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Noll is highly respected in Brazil, and at the same time divisive, somewhat like Hilda Hilst. Neither of them enjoys the universal acclaim you might associate with Clarice Lispector, whom everyone adores, myself included.
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And these are universal relational matters, not necessarily particular to any country.
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I translated the novel and still it remains a mystery as to how exactly how this works. Noll thinks more like an experimental filmmaker than a novelist.
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If João Gilberto Noll were writing in French or German or even Russian, it’s likely he’d be more broadly translated.
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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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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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