Literature Connection: Could you tell our readers about your beginnings in the literary world?

Ricardo Pontes Nunes: I would not be able to say if there was a beginning, a when. I think this has been in us forever, albeit in a germ, even if we don't know it. Over time, we're realizing that, like everything else, it's actually a kind of reunion. In other words, I believe that there is something that we are looking for, as readers and authors, and that seems to be waiting for us, as well as in art in general, or in spirituality. It may be a way of finding meaning in life, perhaps also of catharsis, or of that anamnesis that Plato referred to.

CL: You are the author of the book "Entre Fados e Tumbas". Could you comment?

RPN: It's a compilation of stories, impressions, reports that I gathered, real, imaginary, mixed, to which I intended to give clothes, a literary outline, a poetic, reflective language perhaps. I think that literature is not only made up of the stories themselves, but above all the way in which they are told. But without the stuff of stories themselves, language is often abused. The fact is that I recognized myself in the stories I heard, in fragments of events I saw happening, in my own life or in the books themselves, things that I started to try to reconstruct, to develop a plot behind the central facts of these experiences. I believe that the main goal of Entre Fados e Tumbas is to make the reader share a little of what those characters lived, their pain, their mysteries, their hopes.

CL: How was your research and how long did it take you to complete your book?

RPN: I've owned the sketches of some of the stories for at least five years. After I felt determined to finish it earlier this year, I think it took me another six months. In the meantime, I still wrote the short stories Os Deuses Facínoras and O Sonho de Viriato, as soon as I saw that I could publish them. Some of the short stories involved relatively long research, like The Cognizant Whereabouts of Fawcett, because it was based on real facts, and I had to read entire books to delve into the details of the character's mysterious disappearance; as well as to compose Aos Deuses Manes, which started from a Latin epitaph of a tomb found in an excavation in the century. XIX, and required a certain historical research, from the used bookstore where I found the book containing the inscription of the century. III d. Ç.

CL: Could you highlight an excerpt that you think is special in your book?

RPN: Since it's a book of short stories, each one of them is like a part of the whole book, isn't it? I have, of course, my favorites, which do not always coincide with those of the readers. But I can say that the stories in which the female characters act as protagonists were the most emotional for me when I tried to recompose the details, because they talk about situations that happened in reality with those women; in them, apart from the chronological issue, I hardly needed to invent anything. But all of them are also a little autobiographical, inevitably, obviously even, because they are also the result of the very way they marked my life, the way I apprehended those events, in the language I needed to use to describe them as I had felt them. , recount them.

CL: How should the interested reader proceed to acquire your book and learn a little more about you and your literary work?

RPN: The book Entre Fados e Tumbas – and other mundane accounts is available on several internet sites.

CL: Are there any new projects on the agenda?

RPN: I am currently finishing the translation of The Rise of Anthropological Theory, by Marvin Harris, which I decided to undertake on my own; in recent weeks I have started a longer essay which I intend to release as a book, in literary language, early next year, it is on historical issues related to the primacy of the advent of modern science, of scientific thought, let's say, in the western world.

Quick questions:

A book: The Social History of Art and Literature, by Arnold Hauser

One author: Jorge Luis Borges

An actor or actress: Lima Duarte

A film: Black Blood, by director Paul Thomas Anderson

A special day: There are many, in different instances of our lives. Today, for example, you are one of them, why not?

Literature Connection: Would you like to close with any more comments?

RPN: Just thank Connection Literature. I think I said enough. The rest is in the book, I think it speaks for itself.