For those who appreciate loneliness and risk, books have always been part of summers, vacations, torpor, the tedium of hot afternoons. Company of sofas, clean sheets, deckchairs, towels spread out on the beach, of the silence that filtered through the windows of trains or buses like landscapes, books were a journey to other possible worlds. Most of the books that we remember most nostalgically were precisely the ones that we read during the summer holidays.
For readers, free time on summer vacation doesn’t have to be synonymous with consuming Berlin’s museums, monuments or balls. Vacations are synonymous with mental availability, tranquility for the adventure of a book. The great delight of a summer vacation can be reading the 7 volumes of Proust’s novel, or the complete works of Rimbaud, or even the Icelandic sagas. Why not? Everything will become memory and there those who traveled in the books may have made a more unforgettable trip.
There is, in the summer season, an invitation to go to the visible or invisible cities, be they those of Italo Calvino, those of João Miguel Fernandes Jorge, those of Kaváfis, those of Louise Glück, where past and present meet . Rejecting the idea of tourism but emphasizing the idea of travel, we put our feet on the ground, in the splendor of the grass, in the hot sand, in the curly litter. That is why many of the works that we suggest in this article have Nature as their main theme.
Having received the nickname of “silly season”, the summer months have become a period of the year in which it seems obligatory not to think, leaving books, movies, memories, melancholy closed in the drawer. Fortunately, there are still many people who do not allow “banality to claim the right to exclusivity”, as Silvina Rodrigues Lopes wrote, precisely to defend a Culture that is not “an industry”, a literature that is not domesticated by the “objective ”. hearings.” ” and poetry that is to be read in its entirety and not cut into verses that later circulate through social networks, so that lazy readers pass for scholars.
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Source: Observadora
