Reseña de Um solitário à espreita: crônicas

Milton Hatoum, one of the foremost novelists of Brazil, follows in the footsteps of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Clarice Lispector in exploring the crônica genre as one of his literary territories. Um solitário à espreita (2013) is his first collection of crônicas, previously available only in newspapers (mainly in O Estado de São Paulo) and on-line (Terra Magazine). In organizing the volume, Hatoum revisited, selected, and polished his most representative pieces of the last ten years. As he explains in a concise “Nota do Autor,” genre anxiety does not worry him: readers might in fact consider these texts as short stories or fragments of memory. Major themes of Hatoum’s novels (such as memory, personal apprenticeship, family, and intercultural exchanges) are all represented in these pages in which the great Brazilian tradition of the crônica is enriched by Hatoum’s ability to observe details in the life of others, not unlike solitary travelers in texts by Italo Calvino. As in Calvino’s writings, gravity alternates with lightness: dramatic social problems and heartfelt and comic portraits of friends (and pets) are elements of a sentimental Wunderkammer that aims to please readers through an inexhaustible diversity of themes.