Alcachofra

On happiness and selfishness

"You, The Living" is the name of a Swedish movie that debuts this week in selected Brazilian theaters (Du Levande, 2007). It is a different movie, that might not please all the tastes with it fixed framing on several sketches of the human tragedy. Roy Andersson is the director and the movie is somehow very Swedish, probably making itself harder on people that doesn't know this Nordic society from a close range. But what really caught my attention in the movie was the character of a psychiatrist, who seemed to summarize the movie's essence in his brief line:

"I am a psychiatrist. I have been so for 27 years. I am completely worn out. Year after year, listening to patients who aren’t satisfied with their lives, who want to have fun, who want me to help them with that. It wears you out, I can tell you. My life isn’t exactly a lot of fun either. People demand so much. That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn after all these years. They demand to be happy, at the same time as they are egocentric, selfish and ungenerous. Well, I would like to be honest. I would like to say that they are quite simply mean, most of them. Spending hour after hour in therapy, trying to make a mean person happy… There’s no point. You can’t do it. I’ve stopped doing it. These days I just prescribe pills. The stronger, the better. That is the way it is.”

The scene is available at Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp74nNkSw-g

Possible dreams are simply too painful

ne of my favourite writers is Miguel Sousa Tavares, a Portuguese journalist whose first novel, Equador, was a bestseller in his home country. Even though I always try to avoid bestsellers (the lists have the opposite effect on me: I don’t see a reason to read something that half the globe is already reading), it was impossible not to literally fall in love with Tavares’s historical novel. My only complain: once I finished the book, I had no other novel to read – Equador was his first novel.

Last week, while I was in São Paulo, his second novel, Rio das Flores, reached the Brazilian shelves. I bought it right away. And last Sunday I was surprised by a phone call from my friend and colleague Lula Vieira, one of the best advertising minds Brazil has ever produced, inviting me to have dinner today with Miguel Sousa Tavares! It made my week! It also made me speed up the reading of the 600-hundred-page Rio das Flores. The book is not simply fantastic, it is almost personal - actually it is totally personal! A kind of autobiographical work where the autobiographicality resides in the reader and not in the writer.

One of Rio das Flores’s main character, Diogo, is a rich kid born in 1900 to a traditional land-owning family in the Portuguese countryside. After studying agronomy in Lisbon, he starts to dislike his country more and more. The beginning of Salazar dictatorship in the 1930s, the typical Portuguese fatalism, the easy acceptance of the salazarian fascism by the Portuguese people and even the melancholic tunes of fado bring to the young Diogo an unbearable uneasiness and an stoppable desire to leave.

Post #000001

rtichokes. This is the only subject completely banned from this blog. The reason for that will remain a secret because, if I tell you, I will not be following the ban. However, the world is a lot more than artichokes, so we will be fine. Alcachofra, by the way, means "artichoke" in Portuguese, my mother language. That is right, English is a foreign language to me, but is the one understood by everyone, so I will blog in this language — and that will be quite a challenge. During the next days, this blog will still be under construction, and I will be trying different widgets and designs. Patience is advisable.