tag . ensaios

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📚 Livros

Formas Breves

Ricardo Piglia

Onze textos que unem memória e reflexão crítica, combinadas pelo estilo acessível e envolvente de um dos mais importantes romancistas da atualidade. Piglia volta a suas teses sobre o conto, comenta clássicos modernos como Kafka, Gombrowicz e Joyce, e analisa a obra de autores argentinos como Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt e Macedonio Fernández.

Em Formas breves, Piglia aproxima o ficcionista e o teórico que nele convivem, em textos de estilo cativante e despretensioso, acessíveis tanto aos leitores comuns quanto àqueles interessados em crítica literária.

Como o próprio autor assinala, os textos “podem ser lidos como páginas perdidas no diário de um escritor” ou “como os primeiros ensaios e tentativas de uma autobiografia futura”.

Piglia reflete sobre autores da moderna literatura argentina, como Macedonio Fernández, sobre clássicos da modernidade, sobre as relações entre literatura e psicanálise, e sobre a natureza do conto, tema ao qual volta, com o ensaio “Novas teses sobre o conto”, depois de abordá-lo em O laboratório do escritor (1994).

Com notável habilidade para a síntese e para estabelecer correlações surpreendentes, Piglia faz uma reflexão sobre o fazer literário profundamente ligada à sua experiência pessoal. Como o autor observa, “a crítica é a forma moderna da autobiografia”. Formas breves recebeu o Prêmio Bartolomé March de 2001 de melhor livro de ensaios literários publicado na Espanha.

Ricardo Piglia

📚 Livros

Books v. Cigarettes

George Orwell

Começando com a questão de qual lhe custa mais, livros ou cigarros, os divertidos e intransigentes ensaios de George Orwell exploram vários assuntos, desde os perigos das livrarias de segunda mão à questionável profissão de crítico, da liberdade de imprensa ao que o patriotismo realmente significa.

  • “Books v. Cigarettes” (1946)
  • “Bookshop Memories” (1936)
  • “My Country Right or Left” (1940)
  • “The Prevention of Literature” (1946)
  • “How the Poor Die” (1946)
  • “Such, Such Were the Joys” (1952)

Argument

Orwell questions the idea that buying or reading a book is an expensive hobby. Working out that he had 442 books in his flat and an equivalent number elsewhere, he allocates a range of prices, depending on whether the books were bought new, given, provided for review purposes, borrowed or loaned. Averaging the cost over his lifetime, and adding other incidental reading costs, he estimates his annual expenditure at £25.

“And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.”

In contrast, Orwell works out that before the war he was spending £20 a year on beer and tobacco and that he currently spends £40 per year on tobacco. He works out the national average spent on beer and tobacco to be £40 a year. Noting that it is difficult to establish a relationship between the price of different types of books and the value derived from them, Orwell works out that if books are read simply recreationally, the cost per hour is less than the cost of a cinema seat. Therefore, reading is one of the cheapest recreations.

📚 Livros

A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women’s colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928.

While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled “Women and Fiction”, which was published in the magazine Forum March 1929, and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by men.

“…the spine, which is the seat of the soul.”

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction – so we are told.”

“… the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“Life for both sexes – and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement – is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself.”

“Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.”

“…an avalanche of opinion hot as lava…”

“Anon, who wrote  so many poems without signing them was often a woman.”

“Had she survived, whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed…”

“…it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured…”

“…a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing.”

“What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth.”

“Literature is open to everybody.”

“…as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”

“Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?”

“…the accumulation of unrecorded life…”