What do You think about The Brooklyn Follies (2006)?
Uma das personagens de "Slaughterhouse-5 - The Children's Crusade" de Kurt Vonnegut proclama a certa altura que existe um livro que te pode ensinar tudo o que precisas saber sobre a vida, mas que este já não é suficiente. O livro a que se referia era "Os Irmão Karamazov" de Dostoievski. Esta citação levou-me a ler esta importante obra de Dostoievski. De facto, "Os irmãos Karamazov" explora e analisa - aliás, disseca - impiedosamente todas os grandes temas que assombram a humanidade. É abordado, através de duas gerações de Karamazovs, nascimento e morte; fé e ateísmo; amor e hedonismo; perdição e salvação; a diferença de classes; a resiliência, perversidade e grandiosidade do espírito humano - em resumo, quase todos os aspectos e questões que caracterizam a existência humana. "Anna Karenina" de Tolstoi fá-lo também, mas sob uma perspectiva mais "burguesa" e menos impiedosa, desviando o olhar dos seus aspectos mais desagradáveis e perturbantes. Mas de facto "Os Irmão Karamazov" já não contém em si "toda a vida". Afinal, foi publicado no Século XIX e desde então o homem deparou-se com novas questões e dilemas morais, usufruindo de um acréscimo de liberdade religiosa, politica e social para o fazer (pelo menos numa boa parte do globo). No relativamente curto numero de páginas de "The Brooklyn Follies" são abordados quase todos os mesmos temas, e alguns outros, mas sob uma perspectiva mais moderna e menos ambiciosa. Não estou de todo a sugerir que "The Brooklyn Follies" esteja ao nivel de "Os Irmãos Karamazov" ou de "Anna Karenina". A comparação refere-se apenas ao facto de ser uma obra que abrange muitos temas e questões sobre o género humano sobre uma perspectiva moderna. Ouvira sempre esta obra ser catalogada, no contexto da obra do seu autor, como um "Auster-inferior" por isso abordei-a com algum cepticismo. Fiquei agradavelmente surpreendido. A sua prosa simples é viciante, as suas personagens fáceis de amar e os temas que aborda são inúmeros e abordados de uma forma tão directa e simples (mas não simplista) que se torna fácil nos identificarmos e relacionar-nos com estes. A sua narrativa não vai além de retratar momentos e conversas na vida de um leque de personagens bastante variado, sui-generis e credível, mas estes momentos e diálogos são tão interessantes e a forma como comunicam tão enternecedora que se torna um verdadeiro prazer espreitá-los. Da obra transpira ainda um despretensioso e genuíno amor pela leitura e inclui ainda uma belíssima historia sobre Kafka e uma boneca que me humedeceu os olhos. Apesar de ser um livro essencialmente terno e sobre o poder do amor e da tolerância, a crueldade, fanatismo e indiferença do ser humano também se encontra devidamente representada em certos momentos que poderão ser chocantes para alguns leitores. Mas apesar destes o amor e tolerância prevalece sobre a dor e crueldade existente na vida destas personagens, tal como o leitor deseja que assim seja durante a leitura do livro.
—Hugo Emanuel
Nathan Glass, a retired life-insurance salesman diagnosed with lung cancer, moves out to Brooklyn to die. Throughout the course of the novel, he reunites with his nephew, becomes friends with a charismatic criminal-minded bookstore owner, and receives an unexpected visitor. The title stems from a series of notes Glass is putting together on life's mishaps, eventually to be formed into The Book of Human Folly. It's a touching book with the types of well fleshed-out, "I know that guy" type of characters. A little more feel-good than I was expecting.Auster in his writing deals with unreliable narrators, which on the positive side leaves opportunities for mystery and interesting reflection. But in The Brooklyn Follies, at times Glass might not have been reliable enough to be believable. For a first person narrator, he gives extremely detailed accounts of other people's lives--stories where, in reality, he would have just had a general synopsis of. The academic dialogue will turn off some readers--the nine-year-old seemed overly precocious (but then again, I don't know many nine-year-olds, so maybe that's unfair)...and nephew Tom, who dropped out of grad school during his thesis, talks like a term paper.My favorite characteristic of the story is a question Auster poses of how people find serenity in their surroundings. Nathan finds harmony in Brooklyn, which is why he chose it as his final destination. Tom has a different notion of serenity, dreaming of developing a small society in the woods, escaping American industrialization. Auster manages to make both scenarios seem desirable. Reflecting back on the book, that was powerful to me since lately I've been trying to decide what my ideal environment is--whether it be city, suburban, or rural life. Sometimes the inconvenience of one makes the other seem more desirable, while sometimes small things, like a scene you witness on the street or your favorite diner, makes you appreciate your current setting. Lately as I've been dealing with the obnoxious cost of living in the NYC area, I wonder why people living in extreme poverty stick around when they could be living in small-town America for a fraction of the cost (yeah, I realize how naive that can sound on paper). What makes a place feel like home? Your family, your job, being able to see a musical once a week? For Glass, a large part of it was the culture of the city.
—Kelly
IN PRAISE OF FOLLYThe Brooklyn Folliesby Paul Auster Do not fool yourselves. Behind a narrative with a literary style – the narrator’s – apparently intuitive and simultaneously filled with a straight simplicity and ornaments that seem to evoke a 19th century writing ('there is no escape from the wretchedness that stalks the earth'), a world of allusions and references are hiding, and these make The Brooklyn Follies one of the most inspired works of Paul Auster.The narrator of the story is Nathan Glass, a retired insurance clerk who decides to become a self-taught writer, and you need to be a great author like Auster to take the risk of letting a feeble writer like Nathan control the narrative and still fascinate the reader. Maybe that’s because there are things that can only assume a great expressiveness through the simple words of a simple person – the honest and yet naïve talent of enchantment and illusion becomes more plausible through the voice of the ignorant than through that of the wise man. Or, in a different perspective, and using a Shakespearean analogy, Iago does not fully pronounce the words of accusation, he knows the effect will be far more devastating if Othello himself verbalises the corollary of suspicion that will destroy him.In spite of all, the usual Auster is there: once more an abrupt beginning – 'I was looking for a quiet place to die'; once more a character-writer; once more a book-within-the-book; once more Brooklyn; once more an immeasurable yet unfulfilled will that some details, waved at us en passant, had been more deeply developed because we are sure that other springs are hidden there – it wouldn’t be the first time that Auster carries a detail, a character or a situation from a novel to develop it in another one; once more so many traces that make up, on their own right, what can already be entitled an Austerian – but not austere – style… Repetitive? No way. Despite so many references and common traces, The Brooklyn Follies is a completely new work, and not just because of the style imposed by the narrator’s voice which, to the eyes of the Auster reader is like Coca-Cola in the advertising catch-phrase devised by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, 'primeiro estranha-se, depois entranha-se' (first you drive it out, then it drives into you).The Book of Human Folly, the book within The Brooklyn Follies, the agglomerate of short stories, episodes, loose sentences and descriptions that Nathan Glass writes and reveals throughout the novel is a real prestidigitator’s hat and shows well Auster’ talent to compose anecdotes of human life with a large amount of likelihood (already proven in his National Story Project, which led to the collection True Tales of American Life). These are the anecdotes that make up the traces of the bigger anecdote, for Nathan’s life is also anecdotic – and like any good comedian of life, he finds himself a suitable sidekick for the comedy, his huge nephew Tom Wood, who had vanished from his life years ago and was reencountered in Brooklyn during the new stage of his/their life/lives. The associations may be countless, from the comedy partnership of Laurel and Hardy to the static tragicomedy union of Vladimir and Estragon, but what is certain is that the relationship between the two characters ends up becoming, to a great extent, the fuel that propels the action.I could still mention, to conclude, the themes focused throughout the “follies”, the “follies” of life by themselves – passion, friendship, ageing, dream, homosexuality, ambition, disillusion… – but all those aspects, and many others, only mean a new wrapping for the big streamline, the timelessness that we start to find as a pattern in Auster’s work: the path taken by human life, filled with chance, coincidence, detours, returns, surprises, encounters and evasions and, above all, a lot of folly.
—Vasco
