José Luís Peixoto has been, since his first novel, Morreste-me (2000), one of the writers with the most readers in his own country, as well as abroad, where there are many translations of his books. This first novel of his was born from a brief fictional text that Peixoto wrote and published in an author’s edition. Its publication follows in the supplement DN Young and the reaction caused him to rewrite it and along the way it was declared one of the ten best books of the first decade of this century. The theme is pre-announced in the title, the death of the father. It is The Mountainreturns to his death and (tries) to close the cycle on the pain caused by his paternal disappearance.
It is a tougher book than most of the ones he has written recently and Peixoto is asked if there is a specific reason for this situation: “Things were arranged for the book to happen and for it to necessarily have this theme. It is a book whose first spark that gave rise to it was not my initiative.but it comes in the course of my two most recent novels: Autobiography (2019), which has José Saramago very present, and later Sunday lunch (2021) which features Commander Rui Nabeiro in the scene. And there was a chance that definitely brought me to this project, which happened before the two novels I mentioned and It had been proposed to me by the IPO doctors in Porto: to write about the stories of some patients. I always had this idea in mindbut they wanted a collective book and it was being postponed. Some time ago, I met one of these doctors again and had the opportunity to continue on this path.”
The Mountain It has the particularity of also being about stories of people who really exist, just like the previous two: “A series of components combined that made it a step above in terms of ambition. When the time came to take a concrete look at this project, that’s when I decided that the book would be a novel, because before I didn’t think it was the most obvious genre. This situation of bringing together several testimonies in a novel greatly shaped the structure of the text and, effectively, the theme of cancer prevailed. It was the subject that united all the “characters” and was at the center of everything.”
It was no coincidence that after a certain moment José Luís Peixoto accepted the invitation: “It was a theme that, from an autobiographical point of view and also from the work, since I have the book Morreste-mewhich talks about my father’s death, interested me”. One wonders if the new novel aims to close the cycle of death? It’s not so certain, as he says: “There was a time when I thought this book said everything there was on this topic, but I don’t know if that’s the case, because when I start a project I look much more backwards than forwards and I always try to establish connections with what I’ve already done and sometimes I’m much less sure about where I’m headed. The Mountainthis happens a lot and, in a very direct way, there are several references to books I have already written. In fact, in recent times the issue of biographical versus autobiographical has always been very present and in this case One of the things that was very important was the biographical starting point of those people’s lives, but also the autobiographical, which favors a perception of reality.”
This contradiction creates a moment, according to the writer, “in which little by little a certain surrealism, delirium or metaphor is installed” which ends up becoming a “great fragmentation and with so many elements, which somehow drive the narrator crazy. It is not by chance that this happens, rather because it has to do with the question of the meaning of life and the increasing difficulty in identifying an evident and simple meaning in life. Which is increasingly difficult because the parameters have all changed in this millennium.”
If you thought that The Mountain will be the closing of the cycle started by Morreste-meshortly afterwards the author dispels this feeling: “When I launched the book a few days ago at the IPO in Porto, there was something that I must mention; that in the books I have written to date, none of them have exhausted their theme. I can write books that exhaust the theme they propose, however, these are the ones that suggest and provoke reflections in readers. In the case of this new novel, there are also provocations due to the main subject: we are talking about the truth of the disease and, as an author, I can become a narrator; if, when they tell their perspective, I reproduce exactly what happened or what I imagined based on what people told me.”
José Luís Peixoto is told that The Mountain It is nothing more than a book by an orphan writer. He responds that “now I am even more of an orphan, as it is natural for parents to die before their children, but we write about what we can write and what we have to say. I, unfortunately, cannot write about all topics. At the beginning I have before me a limited group of subjects about which I believe I can say something minimally relevant.”. Hence he adds: “This is a topic that probably hasn’t been resolved yet, or also because it contains within it the topic of my own death, because my father’s death is also, to a certain extent, my own death. Therefore, it is a topic that I have returned to and, honestly, I don’t feel the need to censor myself or inhibit myself. Especially because over the years it has evolved; In the beginning it was very direct and personal, today I see it in a more conceptual way, even a little more symbolic. In addition, readers continue to identify with this theme.”