Gonçalo M. Tavares

Joseph Walser's Machine
~ Goncalo Tavares

The machine weighs heavy on everything it seems in 'Joseph Walser's Machine'. Heavier still is the common metaphor running throughout the novella which binds the allegory-laden, sparse and stoic landscape of the book. History is a machine. War is a machine. And the scant rare emotions as well as the excitement, thus generated if at all in the characters' routine existence, get imbued by the machine.
Set somewhere that could be anywhere, the context of show more war that inspires, terrifies, numbs and disgusts in equal measures, reflects our times bursting at the seams.

"Joseph Walser’s expression of perfect concentration irritated Klober
and the other workers, but at the same time it was clear that the act of
pulling the table didn’t constitute an affront. It was unthinkable that Walser
could commit an affront."

In Joseph Walser, Goncalo Tavares creates the hero of this age, the apparently unassuming, self-effacing lead who would survive anything by doing the least, by not interfering, and not questioning the status quo. And yet, here is an existential hero who a Camus or a Kafka would probably be keen to look into. Would the same not go for Dostoevsky?

Walser embodies his own alter-ego, a character trait that defines the postmodern protagonist. While his counterpart, Klober, interweaves the third person narrative with an endless monologic tirade of rhetoric, and thus expressing a closed circuit surveillance device that runs the danger of exploding itself for has it worked or laboured the machine a little bit too much.

The narrative framework gets only a scattered cast. They dice, they play; whittling the weekends of their lives. On the machines they work, assuming to revel in alternating the perfectly 'rational' rhythm of reality of the times.
Even so, the wars that are fought or avoided, carry a common humming thread. It projects a life that breeds inactivity within an impassioned sense of the mechanical. Guilt, shame, pride or passion are evenly unfelt.
And yet, the writing deploys, emerging slowly like life's own invisible designs, the element of the unexpected, however weak:

"An absurd thought even popped into his head, that he should start
stealing a piece, albeit a tiny one, from each weapon in the city, and thus,
through almost imperceptible means, put an end to all the bother. “A oneman
conspiracy,” said Walser, and he couldn’t stop smiling at how
ridiculous the idea was."

Tavares attempts to halt his tale in an interesting-unforeseen turn of events, in a situation where a series of monotonous actions get overwhelmed by their own mechanistic discipline. In the end, something must give way to the human oddity. For being odd in the perfectly even levelled life is something that still remains at the heart of humanity.

The writing is deliberately succinct, which allows the reader to remain vigilant of the paragraphic climb. The reader feels what lies behind the façade without an actual commonplace deployment of that much used device, irony. The dual character of the linguistic register could be perceived, at times, almost immediately. As a semantic whole, Joseph Walser's Machine must be considered a definitive unit in the "Kingdom" series. show less

Can one build his life on the refusal to really live with others?

This is a story of a "relentless rise" and even an abrupt descent of a man that is born to be a servant of violence.

Lenz Buchmann is an utterly despicable character but what a phenomenal and satisfying portrait of a despicable character it is. Maybe that's why the book works on several levels. The thin line between melodrama and pastiche verges on the absolutely brilliant.

The books looks to me like an instruction manual show more because of its structure (the finely neat division in headlines, chapters and sections and language (technical and analytical, and yet also so distant).

While reading this book Kafka and Gombrowicz comes to mind. I'll try "to verbalize" the reasons:

1 - Tavares vs Kafka: Absurdist tendencies and a very dark look towards life;

2 - Tavares vs Kafka: Aphorisms abound. One could say that the book is almost entirely written in an aphoristic style. The similarities between Kafka and Tavares kept coming to mind ("Nachgelessene Schriften und Fragmente" by Kafka is a fine example of the Art of the Aphorism). In post-modern literature I don't recall another example to keep Tavares company;

3 - Tavares vs Gombrowicz: Battle against the strictures of culture.

Is it shown here the age of the "Death of God"? And with what can we replace Him? Technology...?

Thinking material permeates the book..." show less

O presidente

Um pintor que não tinha jeito para as cores, mas pegava bem no pincel, foi escolhido para maestro da banda.
A Escolha foi feita pelo presidente da cidade, que era praticamente surdo, mas apreciava os gestos minuciosos do pintor. Foi sua primeira e única decisão.
O presidente tinha sido eleito porque era muito indeciso e pelo menos assim não incomodaria ninguém. A população, no entanto, quando ouviu o primeiro concerto da banda, revoltou-se.
Voltem a dar uma tela ao maestro!, show more alguém gritou.
O presidente, satisfeito, depois de sua primeira decisão ao fim de quatro anos, e julgando que a população estava a gritar bis, decidiu-se candidatar-se a um segundo mandato.
A população, apesar da música, elegeu-o de novo. show less

«Quando bem feita, toda a concentração aumenta a intensidade da força e diminui o espaço ocupado. Estamos em menos espaço, mas com mais poder. Como se existissem dois movimentos inversos com sincronização perfeita: cada palavra eliminada aumenta a força das palavras que ficam. Eis a possível definição de haiku.
Trata-se também de uma questão de luz. Se supusermos que há uma luz única, de quantidade fixa, falemos assim, que incide sobre um texto — e há mesmo: a luz natural, show more a luz da lâmpada —, poderemos então pensar que, num número reduzido de palavras, cada palavra recebe mais quantidade de luz; é mais iluminada. E se estivermos atentos aos vários sentidos da expressão «estar iluminado», poderemos pensar em palavras (focos de luz) que nos indicam o caminho quando, no meio da nossa vida, perdidos na floresta, nos encontramos. Em plena escuridão, um pequeno ponto de luz deixa de ser uma questão material, explicável pela física, e passa a ser uma questão metafísica e existencial; ela não apenas me permite ver: salva-me.» show less