Book, Surface Tension of Time, A[LS]

The new and urgent novel by one of the greatest contemporary Brazilian writers. -- Cândido is an expert in pirating films on the internet. Know the file formats, the forums where to find them and the amateur groups that subtitle them. Just by looking at it, you'll know whether it's a poorly recorded copy in a cinema or a high-resolution treasure. Your collection of thousands of films is meticulously organized, in an infallible system of folders and HDs and names. His occupation as a pirate, however, is almost accidental, and the films serve to feed his mother, with whom the almost forty-year-old chemist has lived since his separation. It is to his mother that he gives the flash drives with Asian dramas, French comedies, mysteries, romances. And it is with him that his mother comments on each of the films in the apartment they share in Curitiba. Cândido's official activity is teaching chemistry at a course, where he has a stake. Curitiba still lives under the effects of police and judicial operations that have placed the city at the center of the political crisis that is ravaging the country, effects that Cândido feels in his daily life. It's the Bolsonarist teacher with whom he drinks coffee during a break between classes, it's the constant discussions that divide friends, families and co-workers. It's the federal prosecutor, up to his neck in investigations, and his wife, Antônia, with whom Cândido is having an affair. Sitting on a park bench, without giving news for days, Cândido sees all these ends meet and unfold: the bitter end of the old marriage, the crushed professional aspirations, the new affection denied, the life that dissolves into a broth of war political and social. In The superficial tension of time, Cristovão Tezza — at the height of his form as a fiction writer — uses the country's recent moment to investigate the points of contact between public and private, between politics and intimacy, between desire and loneliness.