Gonçalo M. Tavares wrote about a modest man who undertakes a spiritual tour to India. An epic in verse and prose that takes us to another great national literary treasure, the Lusiadas.
How did the idea of writing a book as if it were the "Lusiadas" Vasco de Camões?
Gonçalo M. Tavares: The idea was to recover a literary genre that is epic, it is considered that marked an era and how could such a feate been done today. In a way was to make a sort of modern adventure of a very modest individual character, a man who intended to go to India to somehow save him selves spiritually. Therefore, the entire path of travel has the same structure as the Lusíadas. Has the same number of songs and fragments narrative follows the events, but in a more modest way. When there is a storm in the epic of Camões, there's a storm in "Journey to India", i.e., there is a parallel. What really interested me was to create another type of text that walked across anything that was not poetry nor was prose.
You describes this book as an epic, but in the "Lusiadas" are all described as heroes, almost demigods, but Bloom is the antithesis of all that.
GMT: Modern literature somehow put the anti-hero, the criminal, the useless man in the center. We may have a novel a protagonist who is a cockroach, or any insect for example, as some key pieces of literature have done. The question here is basically that literature and contemporary art does not treat on the hero as a moral reference, can do it, but talks about other things. I look at the characters as a criminal or not and try to see what the point of view from which he may have, from which point we gained empathy for this character.
Bloom is a foreign name is not Portuguese, was also purposeful?
GMT: In a way it's a tribute to a character in James Joyce and is a name that pleases me loudly, sometimes the only choices are sound. Bloom is something that pleases me.
Yes, but I mean in english blooming.
GMT: Yes, has this sense too.
It is a spiritual journey, it also weighed?
GMT: There were two choices that I mentioned earlier. The "Ulysses" and this sound effect that the word has.
In terms of writing, you said that there is a part in prose and one in poetry, this form of writing the book came from the beginning?
GMT: In terms of form is always the same, what I would say is that it is a genre in the middle. I do not say that sometimes there is poetry and sometimes is prose. The text is a mixture of the two.
So it was something deliberate?
GMT: Yes
You gave a name to this new genre?
GMT: No, no. (Laughs)
As we cannot call it romance, or poetry.
GMT: An epic seems to me is a good title.
