O Clube dos Anjos. Eating: living or dying?

Abstract

Provocative and entertaining, the novel O Clube dos Anjos by Luis Fernando Verissimo presents us with an intriguing protagonist: the writer, Daniel. And it builds a fictional web that leads the reader to think/inquire the boundary between fiction and reality, and also the delicate proportion and limit of things which give us pleasure, such as food and sex; leading their characters through a fine line between freedom, pleasure and life and death. Literature, as the symbolic imagination, “através de todas as estruturas do projeto imaginário tenta melhorar a situação do homem no mundo” (Durand, 1998); and this situation must be constantly observed and questioned, so that it acquires movement and is capable of being altered. Thus, in this work we intend to observe how the act of creating, in its mysteries, unites itself to the evocation of the myths — Apollo and, above all, Dionysus — adding in the plot of the novel a whole range of imaginative suggestion that unfolds beyond discourse registered, but which resides, in addition to the direct allusions of the text, between the suggestive lines, and in the convocation to the constellation of the collective imaginary that runs through the Greek world and the Judeo-Christian world.