Luzes de emergência se acenderão automaticamente
Emergency lights will turn on automatically
by Luisa Geisler
Alfaguara, 2014
294 pages
15×23 cm
Luisa Geisler builds up a subtle narrative, interspersed with a disconcerting humour and catchy passages, that describes a romance made in the shape of a mosaic. A surprising and emotional novel about the uncertainties of maturity.
❝In a way, a relationship is just two people who refuse to give up on each other. Two people who are equally screwed, of course.❞
So writes Henrique, or Ike, in one of the many letters he writes to his friend Gabriel about his day-to-day life, his friends and his dreams for the future. Ike leads an ordinary life in Canoas, an unremarkable city in the south of Brazil. He lives with his parents, works part-time to pay for his university and has a girlfriend. He’s not much of a talker, but has a lot of friends: he’s one of those people who know how to be near someone they care about. The one he feels the closest to is Gabriel, his next-door neighbor since childhood. On a rainy September day Gabriel bangs his head in a freak accident, he’s rushed to hospital and ends up in a coma. After performing emergency surgery, the doctors say there’s not much more they can do — other than wait.
That’s when, around Christmas, Ike starts writing his notes, a sequence of letters, a sort of conversation in which he reports what happens while Gabriel is not there. “For when you wake up”, he explains.
Through short fragments of third-person narration, Luisa Geisler dots her novel with humour and warmth, movingly rendering a young man’s yearnings and insecurities with a gaze both tender and unflinching.
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«A genuine, simple and straightforward narrative, addressing one of the most serious questions in literature.»
O Globo
«It is a book written with generosity, and it demands the same from its readers. The writer disappears behind the characters she created, those boys in the sexual whirlpool of late adolescence and early adulthood.»
Gazeta do Povo
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Represented in collaboration with MTS Agência
Luisa Geisler was born in Canoas, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, in 1991. She’s the author of Contos de Mentira (Tall Tales, 2011) and Quiçá (Maybe, 2012), both of which were awarded the Sesc Prize for Literature and shortlisted for the Jabuti Prize. Quiçá has also been shortlisted for the Machado de Assis Prize and the São Paulo Prize for Literature, and has been translated into Spanish. In 2012, the UK literary magazine Granta chose Luisa as one of the twenty best young Brazilian novelists writing today. More recently, Luisa was invited to take part in the Writers Omi residency program at the Ledig House in New York. Some of her short fiction works and other writings have been published in UK, Germany, France, Spain and the United States.
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