pt | en
Graphic design
Kiko Farkas / Máquina Estúdio e Mateus Valadares / Máquina Estúdio
21.00 x 14.00 cm, 272 pp.
ISBN 9788535915266
43,00
Pen, Sword, Camisole
Novel, 1979 | Afterword by Alberto da Costa e Silva
     1940. The German army is notching up victories across Europe, including the taking of Paris. In Brazil, repression and torture are common practice in the Estado Novo, the dictatorial regime instituted by Getúlio Vargas in 1937 and so far sympathetic to Hitler’s Nazi project.
     It is in this international and Brazilian geopolitical setting that the romantic and bohemian poet Antônio Bruno passes away in the French capital. The poet’s death leaves a vacant seat on the Brazilian Academy of Letters, triggering a veritable war in the intellectual milieu of Rio de Janeiro.
     Structured into brief chapters like a spirited serialized novel, Pen, Sword, Camisole uses fierce wit and torrential pace to turn a local and particular case into a platform from which to broach universal and wide-ranging issues.
     With a little poetic license, the closely fought dispute between the literati can be likened to the war raging across the lands of Europe. On one side is the colonel Agnaldo Sampaio Pereira, a Nazi sympathizer; on the other, the reformed general Waldomiro Moreira. The quarrel drags out over four long months, but neither pretender is a match for the dead poet in style and verve. Nor can they rival his humanist principles, much less his success with the ladies, such as the communist Maria Manuela.
     As the original subtitle would suggest – A Fable to Enflame Hope – the narrative is a light and funny satire on the political conservativism of the elite, the hypocrisy of family traditions and the intellectual vanity of the literati.
     
     The novel Pen, Sword, Camisole draws on aspects from Jorge Amado’s own biography. The plot centred on the dispute over one of the fixed seats on the Brazilian Academy of Letters recalls Jorge Amado’s own election to the ABL in 1961.
     Furthermore, the twilight years of Antonio Bruno, poet and author of “The Camisole Nightie”, corresponded to one of the most important and turbulent phases of the author’s own career. Jorge Amado sets his novel in 1940, during the Second World War and the ascension of Nazism. In Brazil, the Estado Novo dictatorship, under which the author would be censored and persecuted for his affiliation with the Brazilian Communist Party, is in its third year, (1937-1945).
     Jorge Amado wrote Pen, Sword, Camisole at his home in Itapuã, Salvador, between January and June 1979. The fact that the book was actually published during the dictatorship makes it, for the themes it raises, an allegory against the authoritarianism of the past and of that historical present.
     Set against this political backdrop, the book seeks to exalt the liberty Amado still believed possible. The author tried to awaken in the reader the belief that the status quo could be changed. It is therefore no accident that this is the moral of the story, as the author himself defined it: “The moral? See here: everywhere we look outside the world is in darkness again, there’s war against the people, despotism. And yet, as this fable shows, it is always possible to plant [or] enflame a little hope”.
     
     A DRY LECTURE ON POETRY
     Critics had offered many definitions of Antonio Bruno’s poetry. But the label associated with him ever since his first book, one taken up by the press and by the public, one dear to his heart, was “the poet of lovers.” “All lovers read his verses; at eighteen we are all his readers, but women remain so their whole life long,” one critic pointed out, in a long, glowing essay when Antonio’s Selected Poems came out. Certain critics, who did not take kindly to popular works and authors, taxed his poetry with being - facile and anecdotal, but readers found in it the revelation of a universe at once real and magical, in which the ordinary, day-to-day trivialities of life, apparently unimportant things — a little back street and the color of the sky, a cat in a window and a potted cactus flower — took on a new dimension, an aura of mystery.
     A sudden, moving discovery: the street and the dew, the clouds and the twilight, the vast night, landscapes, objects, sentiments.

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