O Grão de Areia - Em Ingês - Grain of sand, pearl and footprint

Grain of sand, pearl and footprint

This and the translation of the review written by Celso Fernandes Campilongo, on the work of Tito Mellão Laraya - "The Grain of Sand"

From the huge work of Tito Mellão Laraya, "The Grain of Sand" (Chiado Editora, 2015) may be "a little small" book, as Francisco says in front of Kívia. Let no one cheat: first-page trick of the experienced writer! Granular modesty of the author, to match the title of the book. From the grain of sand comes the pearl. Painful process as the birth of literary, aesthetic and philosophical concepts. The tiny grain bothers, but it is capable of glorious deeds. From the oyster inside, the strange grain of sand turns into rare beauty. But from the oyster to the outside, the grains assembled can create endless shapes. Several grains of sand mold footprints of people or animals, conceive castles or sculptures, and thus create the beautiful, the artistic and the extraordinary. It is in this movement between the interior and the exterior, mediated by the allegorical oyster, that Titu‘s book builds his creative course.

The inside and outside of the oyster are allusions of the reviewer. Are they recurrent in the various binaries and paradoxes that surround the author's style: think (interior) or feel (exterior)? Work (inside) or pleasure (with the other, that is, outside)? Habit (inner routine that forms the pearl) or eroticism (inventive variation of forms)? Work or art? Francisco (narrator of the book or author of autobiography camouflaged?) Transits his anxieties, desires, dreams and hopes from one side to the other, incessantly. It is not a life cycle - with beginning, middle, and end - but rather a "helical hypercycle" for infinity. There is no identifiable beginning, no end that would suffice for the unity of these differences. The toil turns to art that turns into toil that returns in artistic format. From the grain of sand to the pearl or the grain of sand to the footprint on the beach, the whole time the book moves and exudes bubbly writing!

This creative poetic process is emotion, imagination and passion. They are the elements that Tito combines "dreaming like crazy and creating like no other". The grain of sand moves worlds. It may be the perception of the lover's tender look when she receives a book written in hers honor. It can be the grain of salt, in search of an ideal. It may be the "marriage" (present) ... "than I was" (past) with the "perspective of what I will be" (future) that bears another kind of pearl: peace and satisfaction in the art of writing well. Added unity of past, present and future, in search of perfection.

From a casual dinner to the Bach’s cello-suite, again, the continuous movement from the inside out to the oyster. The night started lonely. From outside came a phone call and a visit. In the office it was no different: from inside, the furniture sober and intimidating; from the outside, customers arriving with a new and challenging case.

The second part of the book is prose. Adventures and misadventures of a lawyer with their cases, clients, colleagues and trainees. Advocacy life: introspection at work and openness to the world. The jurist is never a man divorced from the problems of his time and the yearnings of the community. Rare point in common between poets and lawyers: necessary sensitivity for life. This is what Tito Mellão Laraya seeks to describe with refined simplicity and happy linguistic fluency.

The verb of Tito is agile. The words sprout with lightness and naturalness. Writing well, said Lobato (and it is always worth to repeat), is putting the right words in the right places. It sounds easy, but it gives a job for which few are devoted. Tito Mellão Laraya is one of them. Someone has already said, with well-founded reasons, that reviews are often useless. They are always less than the work reviewed. They never faithfully portray what the reader will find. This review is no different. It will only be of some use if it is able to awaken in the reader, the expectation of reading a good book. "The Grain of Sand" and its author deserve the reading.

* Celso Fernandes Campilongo is a professor at the Faculties of Law of USP and PUC-SP. Graduated in Law by USP in 1980, he was a classmate of Tito Mellão Laraya.