By ADELTO GONÇALVES*
Commentary on the book of short stories by Flávio R. Kothe
1.
A victim of arbitrary acts carried out by the military and their courtiers after they seized power in 1964, which led him to spend many years outside of Brazil, Flávio R. Kothe, a retired professor at the University of Brasília (UnB), once again draws inspiration from his own life to write several of the 30 short stories that make up River of sleep, as he also did in Crimes on Campus: Detective Novel (Editor Cajuína).
In both books, the author seeks to recover lost memories, not all of them linked to the dictatorship, as if literature were an unconscious historiography, or a recovery of what was hidden in history. As an example, it suffices to remember that, in November 1989, the author was in Berlin when the wall separating the two Germanys fell. And that, with the memories of this episode, he wrote The wall (Editora Scortecci), a long historical novel about the process of disintegration of socialism in East Germany.
In short, a life of many adventures and misfortunes. After joining UnB in 1974, he was dismissed from the institution at the end of 1977, beginning of 1978, along with other professors who fought for the creation of the Teachers' Association. He was pardoned by constitutional amendment no. 18, at the beginning of 1988, when he was already at the University of Rostock, in Germany, as a visiting professor.
This is the same amendment that favored former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. “The problem was that the University did not accept me back as a professor, because I had been waiting for five years. And I was only reinstated in December 1992, with the help of the attorney general of UnB, who I knew from Piracicaba, but I was not “allocated” to any department, because they did not want me back”, he recalls.
According to the professor, he had to wait almost a year until he was relocated by decision of the Teaching, Research and Extension Council (Cepe). “When I returned to teaching, in the second week, a student drew my attention to a bag that had been left on a desk in the back. The identification on it did not correspond to any enrolled student; it belonged to a police officer, and there was also a revolver inside,” he says. “I felt so threatened that I handed the bag over to the university reception, as if it were a forgotten object, but it was a message,” he adds. Years later, during the Dilma Rousseff government (2011-2016), he received an apology from the Union for the persecution he had been subjected to.
2.
Upon his return to the University, he recalls that he encountered ill will and persecution from colleagues who had condoned the spurious regime and established regional oligarchies in public education. The reader will find all of this in texts that will captivate him with the plot, the magic of the language and characters that seem familiar to us.
The title of the book comes from this challenge of memory, which flows like a watercourse, which led the author to choose this choice after getting to know the real Rio do Sono, which starts in the Jalapão state park and runs through the entire state of Tocantins. And it also gives its name to a hotel in Palmas, the capital of the new state, created in 1989, where he stayed for two or three weeks, when he went to teach a postgraduate course, within an agreement between UnB and the local university that was intended to prepare staff for the state administration.
This, however, does not mean that the book only contains autobiographical accounts because the author, like a reporter, reproduces in his own words what he witnessed in his nomadic life, weaving the text “as an embroiderer does with threads, a craftsman does with colors in vessels, a net maker does with braiding”, as can be read in the introductory text on the back cover, which also contains a warning that what the reader will find in the work “is not exactly identical to what the author did”.
Or as can be seen in the words of the author himself in an interview he gave, on 5/3/2023, to the newspaper South Gazette, from Santa Cruz do Sul (RS), his hometown: “When we fall asleep, images from the unconscious visit us, drawing our attention to the symbolic character of scenes and things that we had forgotten. Most of this returns to oblivion, but some memories remain, are reworked by fantasy into new units”.
3.
One of the stories that conveys to the reader the hardships – not always confessed – that those who become disillusioned with their country and seek better fortune abroad usually go through is the one entitled “Garden Bench”, a long text, 24 pages long, in which the character tells a little about the difficult life he had to endure, as can be seen in this excerpt: “(…) I had to work at whatever came my way. I was a bricklayer’s assistant in Austria, a McDonald’s cook in France, a pizza chef in England. I learned early on that in these countries I had no soul, that what I had learned in schools in Brazil was worthless. I only had my body to sustain my body. I took a hotel management course and, as I was fluent in several languages, I got a job in an international hotel chain.” (p. 306).
Regarding this story, the author told this reviewer that the text began as a kind of homage, but he noted that the important thing, however, was to outline two different horizons. “That is, one more conformist, of self-help, which had not had any clashes with repression and had been accepted by the mainstream media; another, not just marginal, because it does not want to remain on the sidelines, and not just marginalized, because that would be accepting the command and command of those who remained and have the full support of power, but who managed to suspect a broader horizon, with condor (or vulture) flights over abysses.”
The author recalled that, in this story, he had sought to express the limitation of the first side in his four volumes on the Brazilian canon, written in the solitude of Rostock, while he saw a world falling apart and being undone around him. “This strict horizon of expectation is what dominates the Brazilian intellectuals and reading public. What is celebrated has always been within this horizon. The paradox is that this, which is awarded and applauded, has nothing to say that has not already been said. The problem, therefore, lies in the freedom that opens up to the various paths not yet taken, where one can and must begin to think. Exactly what is not being done. Instead of seeing the lights that are hanging out there, I see warnings of darkness”, he concluded.
In the short story “The Black Bird,” there is also a professor who, in São Paulo, having come from Berlin, already divorced, meets a well-known scientist again and who, after a new flirtation, gives up on the relationship, as seen in this excerpt: “(…) What took my spirit away the most – if you understand me correctly – was the possibility of getting married. I would not marry a woman capable of marrying me. The antidote to attraction was not just marriage: there were already too many people on Earth. I was already married: to my thesis, pure soul, which I had to give body to. Until I divorced her, I would not let myself be seduced by beautiful curves and a sweet smile. I was faithful in my own way. I practiced selective blindness: I did not want to see the future of the thesis or what would happen later. It was a short race, with hurdles” (p. 263).
4.
In the short story “Willie’s Papers”, the main character is a self made man over 70 years old, divorced and abandoned by his family, who has already suffered from cancer and lives in a nursing home awaiting his fateful death. In the meantime, he has recovered some of his memories, leaving them recorded on papers that, after his death, end up in the hands of a friend who writes a kind of preamble to the story. Here is an excerpt: “(…) I too am having to see life from the perspective of death. I am dying little by little. My parents – and I say parents and not my father – did not deserve the son they had in me. They were not up to their task. My destiny was to stay weeding in the fields, being whipped like a slave. What saved me was a priest who recommended me to the Catholic seminary, where I studied until I entered public college. My parents did the best they could: they did not get in my way” (p. 101).
When trying to explain the genesis of his short stories, Flávio R. Kothe also recalled that an old thesis is that a great work needs to emerge from the established horizon, but go beyond it. “When I try to tell stories that are little or not told at all, when I talk about the repression of the dictatorship, this is just one aspect of the issue,” he emphasized. “I think that literature has the ability to suggest reflections that essays in general cannot. It is not just any work that appears out there or even manages to win awards. It is a work for the rare. It will take time for it to be perceived as such. It will have to create its own audience,” he added.
For the author, if journalism lives off immediate news, literature does not: “It lives off the oblivion of immediate facts, to seek that nucleus in which experiences and reflections intersect, to allow us to escape our immediate situation”. Here we can see, even more clearly, the gaze of the fiction writer, who sees beyond appearances and seeks, like a photographer, to portray the unfathomable mysteries of the soul. And all with fine humor and subtle irony. Therefore, it cannot be overemphasized that anyone who dares to read these stories will not regret it. On the contrary. They will only gain in life experience.
*Adelto Gonçalves, journalist, has a doctorate in Portuguese literature from the University of São Paulo (USP). Author, among other books, of Bocage – the lost profile (Imesp).
Reference
Flávio R. Kothe. River of sleep. New York, New York Times, 2023, 348 pages.https://amzn.to/4cPyNIO]
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