Tânia Ganho and the man as a wolf to the woman
In her fourth novel, novelist and (excellent) translator Tânia Ganho tells the story of Fedra, a university professor and forensic anthropologist who dedicates herself to investigating sexual crimes on the dark web , which intersects with the stories of her mother, Amélia, her sister Helena, her teenage niece Leonor and Stefan, a German photojournalist who moves to Portugal and creates a wolf sanctuary there.
One would immediately assume that the book revolves around a denunciation of sexual violence, since, with the exception of Amélia, all the lives described here have been devastated, whether as witnesses or victims, by an increasingly grotesque and omnipresent reality. However, it seems to me that this is not where we find Lobos ' greatest virtue.
If in our lives as readers we remember above all the characters we meet in our favorite novels, narrators are the foundation of the best narratives. If great books thrive on great characters, great writers thrive on great narrators. If characters embellish, narrators prevent the structure from collapsing in on itself. And it is the narrator (or female narrator, in this case it doesn't matter) who is the greatest virtue of Lobos 's novel.
Throughout the more than three hundred pages of this story (where at times, and this will be the main flaw we encounter here, we feel the narrative is running on empty), Tânia Ganho constructs a narrator who subtly, almost invisibly, molds himself to the story he tells, subtly assuming the characters' pain without speaking out against it, maintaining an internal coherence based on the plasticity necessary to reveal the inner lives of such different characters, uniting with each of them without ever relinquishing neutrality and, if we can define it that way, objectivity. Amid the silent familial conflicts of a family that stubbornly refuses direct confrontation, the narrator reveals the reasons on each side, leaving the reader to ponder them, as should happen in great literature. And if this seems insufficient to us, it's only because we've grown out of the habit of evaluating literature by the robustness of its teller.
From this perspective, there is perhaps no greater episode in the entire story than the moment when Stefan finally explodes and attacks what he understands as the self-indulgent fragility characteristic of adolescents, in this case embodied in Leonor (“The levity with which everyone announces they have post-traumatic stress, without any idea of what real trauma is. Suddenly, fragility seems like a virtue to be displayed in conversation (…) Complexes are aired out in the window, traumas are laid out on the clothesline for everyone to see. Who knows what post-traumatic stress is? He knows, he saw.” (p. 293)).
It would also be intuitive to assume, even from the title, that the characters revolve around an idea of predation, to judge that Tânia Ganho's novel is an update of the old idea of homo homini lupus , that is, that man is a wolf to man, or, more specifically, a wolf to woman. It is certainly an important idea, as can be seen by the substantial number of iterations of abuse, or in the episode, in my view central (albeit fleeting), of the elderly man in a nursing home, already forgotten who he is and who he was, within which what we might call an assertive and imposing masculinity continues to surface, raising the question of whether this is a last vestige of who this old man once was or the emergence of what essentially constituted us.
But I was saying, even though all of this is undeniably relevant to the story, perhaps the center of the novel is an idea of cancer, or rather, of an internal disease that spreads until it swallows the characters, and which we see realized in the cancer of the wolf Estrela (whose wound seems to evoke the scars self-inflicted by Leonor), in Amélia's Alzheimer's, in Leonor's nude , in Helena's infidelity, in Stefan's prostate problem, in Stefan's desensitization and lack of empathy, in Phaedra's fear of illness, in Phaedra's work, in Phaedra's subconscious memories and, above all, in Phaedra's resistance to an idea of dependence and intimacy.
Finally, an analysis of Lobos would not be complete without analyzing the story's most interesting character: Fedra's sister, Helena. Fedra occupies the center of the book, stealing Leonor's parental role from her sister and constituting the paradigmatic example of romantic relationships that later recur in the lives of her niece and sister (the love triangle starring Helena seems to replicate the one previously experienced between Fedra, Stefan, and Vasco, just as Leonor's interest in Xavier will replicate Fedra's for Stefan). However, it is Helena's jealousy that breathes life into the story. The jealousy we see surreptitiously lurking because her mother, a literature teacher, gave her such a banal name, the jealousy of her sister's adventurous and carefree life, the jealousy of the intimacy between Fedra and Leonor, the jealousy of projecting onto Amélia's every semi-conscious movement a condemnation of her life, the jealousy of sensing that her father loved her sister more. Jealousy that would drive her into Vítor's arms, and it is curious to note that it is the coldness with which Helena points out Carlos' undeniable virtues that reveals to us that this marriage is over.
More than a certain masculinity promoted by the internet, Tânia Ganho portrays, in Lobos , what already existed long before Zuckerberg's first acne outbreaks. And thank goodness for that.
observador
