Category: Book reviews

Rui Zink | A Instalação do Medo

I don’t always know where to start. Perhaps because of the delay, or because of the moment when I finally picked up the book and decided it was going to be read right away.

I’ve had A Instalação do Medo, by Rui Zink, since June 16, 2021. I decided to pick it up and read it “seriously” in the last week of July 2022. Sitting in the shadow, with a beer in my hand.

Rui manages to make any of us keep a smile on our face while realizing that we live, most of the time, subjugated to fear. In some moments of the book I felt really silly, but attention: silly in the good sense if such a thing exists.

My first folded page is page 40. And why? Because I start to review myself from that page. The horror of the first day of school. Fear, anxiety, restlessness. And on the day I write this, I still remember crying uncontrollably on my first day at school. This school, which is now across the street from where I live, seems much smaller than it was 30 years ago. Here is the nonsense I was just talking about.

“Children do not understand the cruelty of their parents (…) But there is violence, a chill, betrayal, trauma (…)”.

I was quickly gripped by the pages. There’s so much of Rui Zink inside this book. I was once his student and passages like “You know what a sonnet is, don’t you? (…) A sonnet is a poetic form of fourteen verses, created in the Renaissance (…)”, it’s like going back to his classes where you laugh and then you’re learning something else, just like who doesn’t even notice it .

The book has the graphic notes in the right places. Notes in the text that make us smile slyly and help us to read: “It’s strange, now that Sousa seems to speak in italics: — We’re probably going to have to leave the single currency”.

On page 114 I let out the real laugh. Comparing old people to pigeons and reducing old people to the position they occupy in today’s society. They only cause work, expense and “unlike pigeons, they are not even good for shitting a statue”. Old people and children are two difficult points in this country. Where do we put them when we are busy earning a pittance 40 hours a week? The State does not have enough homes, daycare centers, or support for our parents or our children. But that doesn’t matter now either.

Continuing in the book.

This reissue had some rewriting and “Eight billion humans on earth. Obviously, someone had to end up eating a pangolin” must be an addition to the 2012 edition (I haven’t read that edition). If there was a moment when the people received the installation of fear with the door wide open, it was with the pandemic. I know I received it and I still think about how the installation technicians were such good professionals.

In this 2021 edition, the real storm is really well represented and fear remains current — the Markets.

I really enjoyed this book by Rui Zink. I think it would make an excellent play, but he already knows that.

The reading pace is incredible, the dialogues are not at all monotonous and the humor is refined and borders on the sadistic. What more could you want for this beginning of September?

Take advantage of the fact that the author will be this Sunday, September 4th, at 5pm, at Porto Editora, at the Lisbon Book Fair, in an autograph session. Go without fear!

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