By DANIEL BRAZIL*
Afterword to the recently released book by Chico Lopes
Chico Lopes is an author with a consistent and consolidated career in Brazilian literature. Born in Novo Horizonte, a small town in the interior of São Paulo, and having lived there until the age of forty, his entire aesthetic formation came through a lot of reading and a great love for cinema. This resulted in a mix of universal themes and a great refinement in the creation of literary images, which often dialogue with poetry. This vocation for imagery naturally also led him to painting, where he developed a very personal style.
It is not a mere joke to say that his prose is very poetic, and his verses always carry reflective themes, which have a prose background. Chico Lopes is not content with superficial brilliance, wordplay, or hollow formalisms. He always seeks depth, the labyrinths of the soul, existential discomfort, in all his work.
The choice of the setting where his stories unfold – the small towns in the interior that he knows so well – could lead some unwary people to consider him a regionalist writer. Nothing could be more wrong. Chico barely touches on the agrarian question, the unfortunate climate, the life of a farmer, cowboy or gunman, all of which are characteristics of so-called regionalist literature. His characters are urban men and women, or at most suburban ones, who carry conflicts, frustrations and desires that are detectable in any city on the planet.
The discomfort of the world, the feeling of always being out of place – and what place would that be, after all? – the search for intangible things, the perversions and deviations of human beings are the fuel of his fiction. The characters are often anonymous, as are the cities where they travel, and they often express their perplexity in the first person.
It is not possible to call this collection “stories of maturity”, since the author debuted already mature and mastering the subtleties of writing. His thematic and stylistic coherence is remarkable since the first stories, published in 2000 (Shadow node).
Let us take the narrative that opens this collection, Hunting Episode. It is a theme dear to the author, that of the figure in the dark, the mysterious stalker who never reveals himself. In the same way that visual artists methodically return to certain motifs, always seeking to deepen them or discover nuances, Chico Lopes at various times redesigns these dark and mysterious characters, always adding new angles. This constant investigation even resulted in the novel The Stranger in the Hallway, Jabuti award in 2012.
The Whistle, the second story in this volume, shows another side of Chico Lopes' writing: the naturalness with which he writes in a female voice. Here in a more lyrical format, but also sometimes in a more dramatic way, as in The Name in the Air and Losing Hector, Chico places women on an equal footing with the male characters: needy, insecure and tortured by their ghosts.
Another dear character, the absent father, sometimes a Spanish-speaking South American, resurfaces in The legacy e A gesture in the dark. Tales that are tributaries of the novel The bridge in the fog, published in 2021, where the small town gets a name (Verdor), and the setting is very close to his memoir The inheritance and the searchOf 2012.
Some stories prove the author's ability to paint reality in cruder, even cruel tones, like the striking White Christmas or the excellent The Lamp. Others choose as their theme psychological estrangement, the social imbalance caused by an external factor, such as the arrival of a foreigner in a small town, in June Star. A universal theme, already addressed in cinema and literature, gains in this story very characteristic Brazilian tones, highlighted by the author's personal style.
The case of the feet is an example of what José Paulo Paes defined as “the poor devil in Brazilian literature”, when studying the relevance of this profile in several classic authors. Researcher Lohanna Machado, who included Chico Lopes’ literature in her master’s dissertation, revisited and updated Paes’ concept when addressing the country’s contemporary fiction. Also The light bulb e guests of the wind pcan be considered emblematic of this aspect, which includes vagabonds, nobodies, low-class employees, the disinherited and lonely old people. They are all here, in the human landscape configured in these stories.
The narrative that closes the volume, Certain night bird, returns to the more poetic language and the obsession with the unattainable. The mysterious bird, so often present in Chico Lopes' pictorial work, gains a symbolic presence in this story. It is as if the ghostly men that appear at various moments in his literature were embodied in a bird, perhaps mythical, so that the character can finally meet the cause of his anguish and finally “a yes hovers in his mouth”.
I invite everyone to reread these stories. You will certainly find much more than I could have glimpsed in these lines, and you will not be disappointed. On the contrary, you will be certain that Chico Lopes is a unique author in contemporary Brazilian literature.
* Daniel Brazil is a writer, author of the novel suit of kings (Penalux), screenwriter and TV director, music and literary critic.
Reference
Chico Lopes. The widest night. New York, New York: Routledge.
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