Book, Sweet and Bitter, O[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. "Winner of the 2019 Sesc Literature Award in the Short Story category. In the stories of O doce e o bitter, taboo themes are treated with delicacy. The literary quality can be observed in all the sentences, constructed in a natural way, but creating powerful effects. dialogues are agile and precise. There are constant reflections running through the text, which draw us into the narrative and the characters, maintaining a tone that is both violent and soft. For João Gabriel Paulsen - young debut author, bearer of unquestionable literary talent - , a good short story is one that puts the reader before the unusual, the unexpected and the astonishment. In this work, the themes are universal: death and its correlates, as opposed to a tenuous love. Hatred, passion, pleasure, pain. everything there. There are excellent metaphors, and the text bravely avoids any commonplace. The connections create a narrative line that does not break. The contrast between the sweet and the bitter characterizes the almost kaleidoscopic confusion of opposites that weaves the ""narrative mesh "" of each of the stories and the book as a whole. The interior coherence is such that it transforms this work into an indissoluble plot, even if crossed by extremes: the heavy and the light, the dreamlike and the real, The sweet and the bitter. "