Book Review: São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos (tr. Padma Viswanathan)
5/5 - A vivid conjuring trick of ethics and morals...
"And business unfolded automatically. Automatically. Difficult? Anything! If they get on the tracks, they rotate which is a beauty. If they don’t, cross your arms. But if you see that you are lucky, stick it out: the foolishness you practice turns into wisdom. I've seen creatures that work too hard and don't progress. I know lazy individuals who have a nose: when the occasion comes, they unscrew themselves, open their mouths - and swallow everything."
This is only one of the brilliant quotations from this book by Graciliano Ramos. Taking the lacklustre of business and making it into an endeavour of the soul is easy, but making it a plight on the soul is only something I have heard of in William Faulkner’s novels. Take this as a funny interpretation of what Thomas Sutpen would be if he did not have a family lagging behind him and if he had even less morals and ethics than he does in “Absalom, Absalom!” That’s basically this book right here. It’s not only funny, but at the end of it all, it kind of makes you depressed as well. I will not say what the ending is, but it is super philosophical and you wonder if any of what this person did was really necessary. It is a question of action vs. inaction that we also see in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. Does inaction breed incompetence? Probably not. But does the wrong kind of action breed incompetence? Yes, yes it does. This is the exact argument that this book is attempting at with its main character, Paulo. A representation of the man who disregards the ethics of a situation in favour of self-gain and profit seems to be helpless when he meets his match. But another thing is that he feels like his character has suffered a sort of blow and that he will never be the same again. The first half of the book is ironic, funny and satirical. The second half of the book is what I like to call ‘the call to realisation’ in which the main character starts to see, like Lady Macbeth, the blood upon their hands.
I absolutely adore this quotation, which happens also to be my favourite quotation from the whole book. It definitely teaches us about the descent of the character into the space of realisation as they have worked, as they say, so hard to get to where they are. They realise that in fact, they have done very little and though he has questioned why people toil for other people, he makes this stark analysis on life through very minute details. It means so much after you read it over a few times:
“I knew that Madalena was too good, but I didn't know everything at once. It revealed itself little by little, and it never revealed itself entirely. It was my fault, or rather, the fault of this wild life, which gave me a wild soul. And, speaking like that, I understand that I waste my time. Indeed, if my wife's moral portrait escapes me, what is this narrative for? For nothing, but I am forced to write. When the crickets sing, I sit here at the dining room table, drink coffee, light my pipe. Sometimes the ideas do not come, or they come very numerous and the page remains half-written, as it was the day before. I reread some lines, which I dislike. There is no point in trying to correct them. I push the paper away. Undefinable emotions stir me a terrible restlessness, a crazy desire to return, to chatter again with Madalena, as we did every day, at this hour. Missing? No, this is not it: it is despair, anger, an enormous burden on the heart.I try to remember what we said. Impossible. My words were just words, imperfect reproduction of external facts, and hers had something that I cannot express. To feel them better, I turned off the lights, let the shadow envelop us until we were two indistinct figures in the darkness.”
It’s one of those passages that really just never goes away. Especially the end of it where the ‘burden of the heart’ is highlighted as ‘restlessness’ enters the conversation. An insomnia of the heart it what makes this book an emotional torment for Paulo, our protagonist and our anti-hero.
About the Creator
Annie Kapur
195K+ Reads on Vocal.
English Lecturer
🎓Literature & Writing (B.A)
🎓Film & Writing (M.A)
🎓Secondary English Education (PgDipEd) (QTS)
📍Birmingham, UK
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