Life does not always imitate art. More often than not, life inspires art, for obvious reasons. The richness of everyday life is infinite. Dramas, comedies, farces, harrowing tragedies, complicated psychologies, all boil in the reality of everyday life. To know how to explore this inexhaustible material is a test of intelligence, but it also requires a certain amount of adaptation on the part of the writer, as Moacyr Scliar did in producing the works collected in this book.
Accustomed to drawing material for his work from his own mind, the writer from Rio Grande do Sul was somewhat embarrassed when he received an invitation from Folha de S. Paulo to write fiction based on news published in the newspaper. In other words, art not only imitates life, but also embodies the immediate reality of everyday life.
At first, Scliar had his doubts. Would it work? As he threw himself into the project and overcame his own misgivings, he soon became aware of the multiple possibilities of the approach. More than embarking on a new adventure, what fascinated him was the possibility of exploring a kind of virtual history “that complements or expands the real history (if we know just what is the real history).”
So, he began to pick out snippets from the news, apparently incapable of serving as inspiring fictional material: the stock market causing a trader to become neurotic, four people injured by stray bullets, hungry monkeys invading cities, a man arrested for faking his own kidnapping, a supposed mathematical model capable of predicting goals in soccer, the player who wanted to copyright his goals.
These are brief ideas that the author explores with sarcasm, emotion or pure mockery, but always with the gift of communicating with readers and involving them from the very first sentence.
