Darlin fulgidia -

glittering darlin

29/03/2020

Partners • Literature • Books

Comment about the book darlin, by Airton Paschoa, recently released in the second revised edition

By Daniel Brazil*

Airton Paschoa's current-narrative is bumpy. It stumbles over moral dilemmas, twists through desire and frustration, curls into presences and absences, and reveals a tortuous beauty, like a mountain stream fattened by sudden rain. The storm is provoked by the emergence of Dárlin in the narrator's life, a mature and married man who sees in young Darlene (call girl? young homeless man? fallen angel?) the redemption of his mediocrity.

In just over 60 pages, Dárlin's shining silhouette glistens on Avenida Paulista, fades into the shadows of a mansion where respectable couples practice swing, is revealed in a public restroom, multiplies in a march towards Praça da Sé. There are 121 steps-chapters, which form the mosaic of epigrams, interrogations, poems, anguish and sarcasm of this secular Way of the Cross.

Non-conformist, Paschoa's writing does not submit to fashionable literary trends, but reveals universal references. The insubmissive Dárlin is a tropical Nadja, and imposes an atmosphere of poetic and decadent surrealism to the drunken confession of the protagonist. At the same time, the narrative takes on tones of hallucinatory realism, of a traumanovelle Brazilian, iridescent and synthetic. Fleeing from the commonplace, the rebellious creek does not die in a swamp of platitudes: it remains in steep territory, chastising the reader's imagination.

*Daniel Brazil is a writer, author of the novel suit of kings (Penalux), screenwriter and TV director, music and literary critic.

Reference

Airton Paschoa. darlin. 2nd. revised edition. São Paulo, e-galaxy, 2020 (https://amzn.to/47EJUTt).

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