Tatiana Salem Levy Chinese View

Idioma original: portuguese
Original title: Chinese View
Translation: Mercedes Vaquero
Year of publication: 2022
Valuation: between recommendable and okay

Books like Chinese View They force those who read them with the intention of reviewing them, of giving their opinion on them, to an exercise of a certain balance. Which involves balancing the obvious usefulness of the text itself with its strict value from a strictly literary sense. Of course, it is a difficult situation. It is a short novel, barely an hour and a half long to read, in which the author takes on the voice of a close friend, an architect who, in the midst of the necessary preparations for the two sporting events that took place in Brazil (Games Olympics and World Cup) was raped when she went jogging in a park on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. It is a first-person narration interposed and it is of unquestionable rawness and realism, in fact it is a letter from the victim to her children, that is the modality that the author uses to describe the entire process.

Therefore, it is an act of enormous courage, a kind of catharsis, and its intentions are unappealably honest: the denunciation, the testimony, the description of the hard process that begins when a woman finds herself in a situation like this and how tortuous it is. . Nothing to oppose from the perspective of a book like this in terms of being necessary. And my reluctance would not go there, understanding the swampy nature of the matter. But why wait for the book’s epilogue for the victim to decide to shed her anonymity and agree to give her name? I don’t quite see the point, if what it is about is to a certain extent denouncing not only the facts, but also the unpleasant process to which it is forced, both under the alibi of the investigation and for the mere fact of dispensing justice. I suppose that everywhere it responds to a certain scheme in which you have to obtain everything that allows you to search for the aggressor. The examinations of the forensic doctors, the testimony for the complaint, the investigation surveys, the identification of possible suspects: everything can become cumbersome, but I see no other way to get closer to the truth than that. I suppose it can be seen from a colder or more sensitive prism, but unfortunately, I do not think that Brazil is an exception, it is that this process implies a mandatory civil servant intervention, where the emotional involvement may not even be compatible.

This whole journey in which Júlia has to return to the facts and revisit her sensations has seemed to me sometimes predictable and sometimes, due to the narrative interposition, unrealistic or even, I suppose to mitigate the pain, somewhat sweetened. Perhaps a direct testimony, a more direct and stark narrative, would have suited the book’s intentions better.