By EDUARDO SINKEVISQUE*

Commentary on Veronika Stigger's novel

for Rodrigo Turin

“Don’t point your finger at Benazir Bhutto, you son of a bitch,/ she’s mourning her father’s death” (Chico César).

Read Krakatoa, a novel by Veronika – with a k – Stigger, practically since the day the author held a book signing with readings, sound effects and a debate in São Paulo, at the Megafauna Bookstore in Copan. At the bookstore, during the debate, I was already wondering where it came from Krakatoa, reminding me “where baião comes from” and that it comes from under the clay in the ground. I relate Veronika’s writing in Krakatoa with the main question of the song by Gilberto Gil that I prefer sung by Gal Costa “De onde vem o Baião”.

Perhaps Krakatoa comes from under the mud on the floor of the dance floor. It certainly comes from many of Veronika Stigger's inquiries, speculations, beyond the research undertaken and the invention. Krakatoa it really comes from under the dance floor, but not from where the writer dances, but from where she travels and/or traveled and/or imagined traveling, after all fiction, after all also a travel diary, like through Indonesia. Where, if not from under the very depths of the Earth, do volcanoes come from?

The dance floor is this danced Planet, dancing in the Age of Anthropocene, which André Araújo dealt with in 451, thaw, greenhouse gas, end. On that night of 19/09 when the launch took place in São Paulo, my father was still alive, but almost without lava, but almost without life. I was emotionally buried, having said goodbye to him for about two years already.

Veronika Stigger's text displaced me from that burying and made me dive in. I let myself be buried and at the same time immersed in the writer's elegant prose, almost always seeing her smile, her enigmatic gaze and hearing her voice that preserves the prosody brought from Porto Alegre. I began to perceive the arrangement of the parts and within the parts, their parts in their arrangements.

In Veronika Stigger's second novel I don't find paragraph divisions, but rather massive narrative and/or poetic and/or dialogic blocks that don't give the reader any breathing room. From Gilberto Gil's song, I started listening to the Beatles, Help, in voice and guitar by Caetano Veloso while I read. I understood more about the textual blocks. At least before poems, the larger texts (from the first part of the novel) not the smaller ones.

I finished reading Alba. My father remains hospitalized and is less and less alert. He swears, however, and threatens to hit the nurses when they change his diapers, give him medication, listen to his ears, etc. In the margins of the copy I am reading, there are traces of my reading like footprints of my presence on that ground.

I have highlighted the word “wolf”; Veronika Stigger’s style is enumerative, as if she were sometimes listing, making lists. Part of page 57 is an example of this. This moves the writing, amplifies the narrative. Sometimes it reduces, sometimes it amplifies, interspersing amplification e reduction, interspersing musical movements, even symphonic ones. Like an accordion playing baião, baião de dois, a symphony of volcanoes.

I emphasize the word fascinating, the word tamed like a beast. My father starts to stress me out a lot at the end of my shifts with him at the hospital. I start to get exhausted after 24, 26, 27 hours locked up with him. In “Monólogo do Carvão” I highlight that the world is totally devastated, the fetid gas, and the fact that there is no more green. In “Muntagna”, everyone is dead without knowing or pretending not to know.

My father withers, wastes away, but he is capable of celebrating my professional achievement with me and agreeing with the beauty of those I desire. He is a deactivated volcano now. The second part, “Anak Krakatoa”, seems to me to be more forceful, stronger. Less ghostly and sinister than the first. I am a reader who is the son of a volcano. Of a volcano on its last legs.

My mother tells me that doctors prescribe daily aspiration of my father's lungs. Some days they do this procedure twice. At this point, I recognize Veronika Stigger's fluid, technical writing, and brilliant idea. I also recognize effects of coldness and distance. It is not a cute heart that makes up the book. Rather, a Capricorn heart, even though Veronika Stigger is an Aquarius.

even though Krakatoa being a completely contemporary novel, the narrative time is an undefined time. There are indexes that the reader, if he wishes, can recover, defining a temporality known and/or recognized as pandemic. My mother calls me: your father won't make it past this week.

There is a question that I think is recurrent in the novel and that perhaps has not been discussed yet, I don't know, but when I read it I keep seeing it all the time, that is, formulations of sentences that indicate that the action of the novel takes place in an after, in a post, in a no longer, as in “no one sleeps”; “there is no one left to sleep”; “no one cries”; “there is no one left to cry”; “after the beginning of the world”.

In the first part of the novel, the elements of nature speak: water, earth, fire, in a symphony of volcanoes, in an erupting writing, and it is a narrative that comes from the center of the Earth, let's say, from the depths, like a cry for help from a dying planet. Your father won't make it through today, my mother says in a WhatsApp message. I read while my father is dying, asking for help, asking to leave.

Maybe the Earth, in Krakatoa not be someone who is sick, but in convulsion, in a radical movement of transformation due to devastating human action. In the second part, I understand that Veronika Stigger narrates what came from Krakatoa, the offspring of Krakatoa, Anak Krakatoa, the newspaper news, a diary.

Krakatoa It is a novel written with the temporality of after, after it has already been, already happened, already finished. It is very distressing to read the novel from this perspective that the end has already happened, it is over and that no one is left and that the only one left is a ghost, perhaps a lost voice on a planet that no longer exists. The book is captivating because it puts us inside it.

When I noticed a certain formulation of a sentence that indicated a temporality of the after-all, of having already happened, of having already finished, I began to write down these sentences, because they are recurrent in writing. And then I began to realize that temporality is all that I write down, but markedly after it has already happened, that it is already finished.

There is something very interesting in the book, which is a mythical dimension, the myth as a narrative form, updated. The time of the myth is a time that is neither past nor present, nor future. It is a time of simultaneity, of coexistence, of competition, although the human characters, if they exist in the novel, do not coexist, with one or two indications of this. Your father has passed away, my mother tells me in a WhatsApp message.

Krakatoa It is not an easy book. It is not easy to look at the corpse of your father. It is not easy to think about the corpse of the planet. Veronika Stigger makes those who have no voice speak. As in other times in Brazilian literature, authors, at other times and in other ways, have given a voice to those who had none. For example, Graciliano Ramos gave a voice to the drought-stricken migrants, and even to the dog Baleia. Guimarães Rosa gave a voice to those who had no voice in literature, that is, to the gunmen. Clarice Lispector gave a voice to the migrant from the Northeast, Macabeia. Verônica Stigger gives a voice to the Center of the Earth through the symphony she composes. Veronika gives a voice to the planet.

Sometimes I think that's it, that it's a dying planet, that's dying, crying out for help. Sometimes it's a planet that has its own life, independent of humans, and that is reshaping itself. The guava tree in front of my house is producing an abundance of ripe fruit, flooding my gazebo, my sidewalk. I'm recovering from a fracture in my left knee caused by a domestic accident, a fall down the stairs.

In the last month of my father's life, I was unable to stay with him in the hospital. I did not see him waste away completely, nor did I witness his lungs fail. Veronika Stigger's narrative of the end, of the without, of the after-everything brings the reader closer to love. Krakatoa ends with love: “Accept Love! – this is how Indonesians express gratitude. The expression literally means ‘receive love’.” Even with love, it is hard to look at your father in the coffin. Even when it ends with love, Krakatoa does not sugarcoat the pill. The conductor shakes the baton, and languid and sad the music breaks out.

*Eduardo Sinkevisque has a post-doctorate in Literary Theory from Unicamp. Author of, among other books, Poems of Branca (Digital Tree).

Reference

Veronika Stigger. Krakatoa. São Paulo. However, 2024, 176 pages. [https://amzn.to/3XXF00G]

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