Book, Hugs denied in portraits[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. On one side, a woman travels on a train towards Paris, where she is going to give a conference at the Sorbonne, and remembers the girl who gave birth to her. On the other, a girl leaves her present to find the woman she has become. The two stories in this moving book by Simone Paulino will intersect in the hands of the reader who, not without surprise, will discover what unites them both, the woman- girl from “In Portraits” and the girl-woman from “Abraços Denados”. In the first narrative, we have an album that contains, in its “photos”, moments of light and shadow of a life, shaped in the architecture of the stained glass windows (which only exist through the joining of the pieces). If “the boy is the father of the man” , as Machado de Assis said, here the girl (remembered) is the mother of the woman (who remembers). But it is not enough to generate this one – as another Simone (de Beauvoir) stated, it is necessary to become a woman (which is always a test of resistance). In the second story, the reminiscences leave the 3x4 and take on the woman's perspective in the adult world, in larger fragments, which record absences as painful as the presences, as these, although loved, are witnesses of the suspended caresses. The floor, the colors and losses in childhood gain beauty through the revealing liquid (affective writing) of Simone Paulino. In the end, the reader will understand why at the confluence of latitude (one story) with longitude (the other story), a supra-literary daisy emerges – sister to the one that sprouted, between the cracks in the asphalt, in the Drummondian verses of “The Flower and nausea.”