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- Herausgeber: Young Dedalus
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Vivaldo Bonfim was a bored book-keeper whose main escape from the tedium of his work was provided by novels. In the office, he tended to read rather than work, and, one day, became so immersed in a book that he got lost and disappeared completely. That, at least, is the version given to Vivaldo's son, Elias, by his grandmother. One day, Elias sets off, like a modern-day Telemachus, in search of the father he never knew. His journey takes him through the plots of many classic novels, replete with murders, all-consuming passions, wild beasts and other literary perils.
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Contents
Title
The Author
The Translator
Dedication
Chapter 1 Books and more books!
Chapter 2 Stairs and staircases
Chapter 3 Sometimes her voice becomes a little crumpled
Chapter 4 It was full to the brim with words
Chapter 5 I read book after book
Chapter 6 What we are really made of
Chapter 7 I finally read that book
Chapter 8 Inside the book
Chapter 9 My name is Elias Bonfim, and I’m a very determined individual
Chapter 10 He always had quotations under his arm
Chapter 11 My thoughts didn’t go to school
Chapter 12 Who doesn’t like her?
Chapter 13 Tea with Mr Stevenson
Chapter 14 The weight of other people
Chapter 15 A man halfway to being a wild beast
Chapter 16 It would be best to leave it for another day
Chapter 17 A blow to the collarbone with a stick
Chapter 18 No one can deny I’m a hard worker
Chapter 19 She walked straight through me as if I were a revolving door
Chapter 20 Vladivostok
Chapter 21 The baron in the trees
Chapter 22 A detail
Chapter 23 The temperature at which paper burns
Chapter 24 I couldn’t move for the sound of sobbing
Chapter 25 The butterfly
Chapter 26 People turn into books
Chapter 27 Custard tarts
Epilogue
Authors mentioned in the text:
Copyright
The Author
Afonso Cruz (born 1971) has written over thirty works of fiction so far, and his work has brought him many prizes including the European Union Prize for Literature and the Prémio Literário Fernando Namora, with The Books that devoured my Father winning the 2010 Prémio Literário Maria Rosa Colaço. The Books that devoured my Father has already been translated into over ten languages.
As well as working as a writer, illustrator and maker of animated films, he also sings and plays in the blues/roots band The Soaked Lamb.
The Translator
Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers. She won the Portuguese Translation Prize for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa in 1992 and for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersão in 2012, and her translations of Eça de Queiroz’s novels The Relic (1996) and The City and the Mountains (2009) were shortlisted for the prize; with Javier Marías, she won the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White, and, in 2000, she won the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s All the Names. In 2008 she won the Pen Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eça de Queiroz.
FOR MY CHILDREN
Chapter 1
Books and more books!
‘Vivaldo!Vivaldo!Vivaldo!Vivaldo!’ yelled the head of department, but to your father, that voice was just a kind of background noise, disappearing round a corner.
This was how my grandmother would begin telling me the story of Vivaldo Bonfim, my father. He worked in the 7th division of the tax office, and found himself marooned in a dull, tedious, boring, monotonous world full of bureaucratic paperwork and other documents, all made from the wood of trees, and yet a world bereft of literature. At this fateful moment, my mother was pregnant with me, and I was swimming around in her womb, like clothes gyrating in a washing machine. My father thought only about books (books and more books!), but life was not of the same opinion: his life had its mind on other things, and he had to work. Life often shows no consideration at all for the things we like. And yet my father would take books (books and more books!) to work with him and, whenever he could, he would read in secret. Not a very good idea really, but the impulse was irresistible. My father loved literature above all else. He would hide a book beneath such things as tax statements, declarations of a change to personal details, and other equally illustrious documents, and would then read discreetly, meanwhile pretending to be working. This was not a very wise thing to do, but my father thought only of books. Or so my grandmother told me, her brow furrowed in thought.
I never knew my father. By the time I was born, he was no longer in this world.
Chapter 2
Stairs and staircases
What is a euphemism? It’s when we want to say things that might hurt and so, to avoid that, we use words that are not quite as sharp. For example, rather than saying that my father died of a heart attack, I can say he is no longer in this world. Then again, while ‘he’s no longer in this world’ might seem like a euphemism for ‘died’, it isn’t. As you’ll see, it’s the literal truth, and not figurative at all.
One afternoon, an afternoon like so many others, my father was reading a book he had hidden away under a tax form so that his boss wouldn’t notice that he wasn’t working. And that afternoon, he became so immersed in, so focussed on, his reading that he actually entered the book. He became lost in it. When the department head went over to my father’s desk, my father was no longer there. On the desk lay a few tax statements and a copy of The Island of Dr Moreau open at the last few pages. Júlio (for that was the name of my father’s boss) called out to him: ‘Vivaldo! Vivaldo!’ but my father was gone. He had become part of literature, and was actually living that novel.
My grandmother explained that this really can happen if we concentrate very hard on what we’re reading. We can actually enter a book, as my father did. It’s like leaning over a balcony, although far less dangerous, even though it does involve falling several storeys, because a book can have many storeys. I found out from my grandmother, for example, that a man called Origen once said that there was always a first, superficial reading of a book and then other deeper, more allegorical ones. I won’t say any more about that here; it’s enough to know that a good book has more than one skin, and should be a building with several storeys. Just having a ground floor isn’t enough for a book. It’s fine for civil engineering, and comfortable for anyone who dislikes stairs, and useful for those who can’t cope with stairs at all, but literature needs storeys to be piled one on top of the other. Stairs and staircases, with words above and words below.
