“I am going to answer by putting together a cunning bookshelf, just with authors who have died and were important in my history of reading”, she explains. Marisa, of course, has her personal selection of favorite books. Manners, uncertain, for, as Marisa suggests, “deciding, in short, if the book has something to tell him”. Indeed, many are the reasons that lead a reader to read a novel: the opinion of friends, the attraction for a title, the act of opening a book in the middle and at random, taking a squint in a bookshop. And why he has read what he has read, and why he has not read what he has not read”, says Marisa.

And it is to these that Marisa Lajolo devotes herself. “I think it is very interesting to discuss what the reader without the habit of reading has read or what he has not read. Why do some prefer Guimarães Rosa, and others Clarice Lispector? Why is the group of readers that are enthusiastic about Graciliano Ramos not always the same as those who devour, with the same fervor, the work of Machado de Assis? Do answers to these questions exist? If there are no ready explanations, these disagreements serve, at the least, for delicious intellectual exercises. Many factors help to explain why we like a book and are not interested by another, and even so, no one of them, and not even the sum of them, goes so far as to explain these two facts. “Recommending books, even for people you know, does not always work out, so imagine for people you don’t know!” Indeed, the world of reading – an intimate exercise, performed in reclusion and silence – is governed by the particular. “I have the greatest difficulty in giving universal recipes”, Marisa warns.

Como e por que ler o romance brasileiro, a book from the collection “Como e por que”, from the Ática publishing house, is immediately becoming a sort of guide not only for readers on their first voyage, but also for those who are accustomed to circulating through our fiction.

Why is it important to read Brazilian novels? And how to choose the best gateways to its complex universe? These questions have just been given some stimulating answers for critic and professor from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) Marisa Lajolo.

O Tempo e o Vento by Erico Verissimo