"I read the way one might stroll. … I feel myself to be a sacred trespasser…"
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
When the Viennese author Stefan Zweig first travelled to Brazil in 1936, he deemed the South American country “terra incognita in the cultural sense.”
Now that we've lived with Brazil through the Olympics coverage and caught glimpses of the place and its people, we look to a variety of novels to pull us further into this diverse land.
Literature reminds us that we should never be afraid to look at something as though we’re witnessing it for the first time, however well we think we know it. This is one reason great books offer endless company and sanctuary. Each expedition into them reveals new vistas: the book becomes more intelligent as we grow alongside it.
"... life has so much more imagination than human beings, is never, even in the face of the most conclusive proof, predictable or definitive."
Flavia Company, The Island of Last Truth
In our latest Reading Around the World, we explore the Argentinian-born Catalan writer Flavia Company and her masterful slim novel The Island of Last Truth.
We continue through Africa in our Reading Around the World series. This time, join us in Somalia with Nuruddin Farah and his masterful Hiding in Plain Sight.
"If the paranoid regime of Siad Barre won't allow me to return because of my writing, then my work must be worth continuing. I must write something worthy of the challenge." Nuruddin Farah
© Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais. All rights reserved.
