Notebook of Colonial Memories - a love letter to a racist father; exorcising Portuguese demons. It's a new book of Isabela Figueiredo based on the posts of her blog.
Taken from Jugular:
It is a sweet and brutal picture, brutally sweet, written almost as a betrayal. To call her father racist, to take the racism of the settlers, the Portuguese, the Mozambican white, the "system". This is something that ensures furious controversy. A world which belongs Isabela since 2005 (with the blog Perfect World, now replaced by the New World) and where she began her purges - a purge that these memories admittedly are - the unpleasant reactions were swift. "It is normal", Isabela said, She sees the massacres in September 1974 - in which she didn't die by chance - as "a fair retribution". In the country in which one could run over a black man and not go to prison.
Today in my trip back to Italy I had plenty of free time so I finished the Logicomix book. A kind gift from my cousin Hugo :) For the ones who don't know yet, Logicomix is a comics book about the history - or better, the characters, of logics. The text is witty and the art is amazing. You can trust me on this one because I'm not a fan of comics, quite the opposite. Also interesting is that a (very) famous theoretical computer scientist, Christos Papadimitriou is one of the authors and appears as a narrator in the book.
Just wow - Logicians were (are??) completely crazy. Comes with the job I guess. Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Fredge, Gödel, North, all just crazzzzzy. Mentally ill, open marriages, dementia and more really crazy stuff. Reading the book is like seeing a documentary about the work of some genial revolutionary and eccentric artists but with rock star scientists instead.
I'm a huge fan of short stories but it's hard to find the format in bookstores - perhaps with a few exceptions of really famous authors like Jorge Luis Borges or Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I really don't know why this happens. The format definitely needs some marketing but it's terribly addicting. After reading the first it's very hard to stop. Like popcorn but denser. Yogurt instead of milk. I guess that this is what captivates me the most as short stories tend to cover a short period of time, one plot, one incident; but you get to know the characters as well as in novels. Anyway, the reason why I'm posting this is because I found this radio program from the 50s, NBC Short Story. There are only 25 of them and listening is not the same as reading but it's cool anyway to have access to them. And, you get a special feeling this way. Like you were listening to one of those really old radios.
The New Yorker's Review of António Lobo Antunes.
"Writing, as he practices it, can be creepily close to vivisection, and his novels conduct an autopsy that is both personal and political."
Today Mafaldinha turns 45. When I was young I spent more time reading it over and over again than doing anything else. I still like to think that I have a bit of Mafalda, Felipe and Miguelito in me.
For those of you (us!) who despise Dan Brown and don't want to read his late(st) crap, here is a great book I've just finished. In the beginning I was a bit weary of the decadent industrial setting but the characters are brilliant. So is the book.
I've just finished reading Cantor's Dilemma and liked it quite a lot. The end is slightly disappointing but the relationships between the characters are very well played. Recommended.
I've just finished the book The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by António Damásio and I recommend it. Very, very good. For Portuguese speakers it's interesting to watch this.
