Incompleteness: Stories

By Danilo França

In this book there are 28 stories that seek to understand the human condition in most sensitive and sincere form, mixing reality and fiction.Excerpt from the book:My fullness refers to the least of things. It is a continuous not to understand. This is what for now I can define what it would be like to feel fulfilled, complete, full in all possible ways. I think I can do even more: maybe reaching this point is not possible, and we, poor mortals, delude ourselves into everyday epiphanies, searching for the impossible. No, not so impossible, I can say that today, yes, this afternoon I reached a fullness, a mental rest that made me feel nothing, not thinking about anything, deserving my own silence. Feeling of accomplishment, at the same time knowing that everything around me may not be as I always wanted, but for this moment everything was ready. That's right, I felt ready this afternoon.Excerpt from the preface to the book:'As in the texts of other authors of this early century, one of the marks of these reports is the refusal to fit into crystallized genres. As an attentive reader of the writer Clarice Lispector – who in several texts seems to be present as inspiration, as a resonance or as an inheritance – the author knows that gender cannot “take” these writing exercises, texts that are intended to be in motion. (...) Another point that we must realize when entering this field of fiction by Danilo França is the very delicate way in which the writer manages the words. The descriptions are meticulous, but the most important thing is to understand how the author manages in short narrative spaces to shift our gaze to smaller elements.'Luiz LopesPh.D. in Literary StudiesAbout the authorDanilo França is a teacher, researcher and artist. Graduated in Performing Arts and Master in Language Studies. 'Incompleteness' is his debut book. Currently lives in Belo Horizonte.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bibliomundi
• Release date: Mar 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005793951

Danilo França

Danilo França é professor, pesquisador e artista. Licenciado em Artes Cênicas e mestre em Estudos de Linguagens. Incompletude é o seu livro de estreia. Atualmente mora em Belo Horizonte.

Book preview

DANILO FRANÇA

Incompleteness

Stories

Copyright © 2020 Danilo França do Nascimento

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781005793951

SUMMARY

Dining out

The sea and me

Rediscover

Select and delete all

Romance

Desire pill

Adriano's misadventures

Child doubts

Gabriel and his owner

Plenitude

A double being

My first loving

John Doe

Can I tell you a story?

Empty body, inflated soul

He and he another

Epiphany

Mother concerns

Always in search of

Insomnia

Navel

The travel

Pipoca

Feel the mystery

Roots

There was no breakfast

Clarice alive

Cheer

PREFACE

Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But – I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.

Clarice Lispector

Danilo França appears on the field of contemporary Brazilian writers with the volume Incompleteness, which gathers 28 stories that should be called as fragments-texts. As in the texts of other authors of this early century, one of the marks of these reports is the refusal to fit into crystallized genres. As an attentive reader of the writer Clarice Lispector – who in several texts seems to be present as inspiration, as a resonance or as an inheritance – the author knows that gender cannot take these writing exercises, texts that are intended to be in motion.

Gilles Deleuze once explained that to write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. (Cf. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. London: Verso, 1997). As we approach Danilo França's texts, a first reading movement may be only to read the texts through the bias of autobiographical reports, which would not be a mistake in a large part of the whole, but, perhaps, a way of approaching that, if done exclusively, can overshadow other possibilities and reading positions as relevant as first. What seems salutary to point out to the reader who comes into contact with these texts-experiments is that we are facing fictional exercises, attempts to impose form on what is unformed naturally.

Another point that we must realize when entering this field of fiction by Danilo França is the very delicate way in which the writer manages the words. The descriptions are meticulous, but the most important thing is to understand how the author manages in short narrative spaces to shift our gaze to smaller elements. As in the great tradition of short texts, we read Danilo as one who always reads two stories: there is a macro movement of the narrative that operates in the action of the characters and in a certain linear logic, which simply seeks to resolve a tension placed by the narrator. What seems fundamental, however, in each of these 28 texts, is the narrative that operates in a counter-movement, a kind of smaller narrative, second movement or deviation, that makes the reader perceive another logic that rejects the idea of progression, linearity or fixed meanings for what is being narrated.

In this way, Danilo França's texts can be read in the light of what David Lapoujade affirms, reading Souriau, in his book Les Existences Moindres, the fact that what often interests in the great books of philosophy and literature is the establishment of weak existences: Souriau sees the artist, the philosopher or the thinker as the defender of weak existences, all those existences that claim to exist in another way or to conquer more reality. (Cf. Lapoujade, David. As existências mínimas. São Paulo: N-1 edições, 2017). This statement by Lapoujade seems to explain the set of texts by Danilo França and the images that appear, for example, in The sea and me, when narrator and sea merge, in Epiphany, through the questioning of the apparently antithetical individual me and collective me, or even in the encounter of the me with the dust of the world in Navel. What is in these texts are all minimal ways of existence, not yet thought and yet to come.

Finally, it is worth saying that the reader has a volume of texts that combine two concerns that are so recurrent in the best contemporary production in Brazilian literature: on the one hand, the limits of language, the careful work with words and, on the other, experimentation that begins in language and ends in an unfinished way in the possibilities of being always others, as a poet once said: I is another.

Luiz Lopes

Ph.D. in Literary Studies from UFMG

These fragments of book mean that I work in ruins.

CLARICE LISPECTOR

We all feel incomplete in some way, all we produce a part of us and not the other.

ITALO CALVINO

Dining out

She felt a suffocating heat at home, late winter in Belo Horizonte, a dry air that forced her to turn on the humidifier and the air conditioning in the room. She read another page of the book, stroked the white kitten that was lying on her lap, and gently took a long shower, not to clean only her body. She washed her medium and curly hair with care and affection, moisturized it, she was happy. She wrapped herself in a fluffy towel, and put another one in her hair. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror for a long time, noticed her body's imperfections, but focused on the face and was satisfied with the disposition of her nose and eyebrows. She thought about dining out, I deserve it, the week was hard, and another one would start the same.

She put on a green dress, made for summer even though it was winter, and splashed a sweet perfume on her. She fixed the hair, and meditatively looked at herself in the mirror again, but in another, larger one that reflected her entire body. Even more satisfied, she saw that she loved herself. She applied powder on the face and red lipstick on her dry lips.

And she went to the streets, lightly.

Her apartment was close to the cinema, which had the luxury of her own company, as it was new to her. She never imagined that could go to the cinema or theater alone, but since the first time it succeeded, she never wanted to stop doing it.

The film was experiencing its peak in the city, all of her friends commenting on social media, so she decided to watch it as soon as she could, and Sunday seemed to be a great day. She thought the name of the film curious, searched on Google for its meaning. A bird, oh yes! She didn't read the synopsis, liked to be surprised. She bought her ticket through the app because she knew it was running out quickly. She switched it from virtual to paper at the box office and drank her coffee with pão de queijo, as she always did before the cinema. She was more alert, wanted to pay attention to the film, because she liked the last production of that director very much, he is a genius of the new generation, she thought.

The film started out confused, and she paid more attention, because she really wanted to like this one too.

But she was averse to violence.

Every shot she heard from the speakers, every body that fell bloody on the screen was a leap from the seat she gave, and she squeezed her white thigh covered by her light fabric dress. She felt even more hot, and thought angrily, Why this cinema does not have adequate air conditioning, so traditional it is?

Then another death, and another. Every violence she witnessed made her curl up in her seat, and tightened her grip on the thighs. She knew it was fiction, she knew she was in front of a screen, with lights and sounds making her delude herself, but the sensations were extremely real.

She had been surprised. The bird on the poster made no sense. Yes, after a little reflection.

Impacted, she left the theater without looking at anyone but herself. She went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. She washed her face, and slowly removed the little makeup she had applied to herself. She decided to keep dinner, but