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By pigwhisperer, May 27, 2010

Maria, Tamires, Frederic, James, me & Yacob on the farm

In preparation for an essay I wrote for an upcoming edition of Real Simple Magazine, photographer Frédéric Lagrange and his assistant Yacob Vincent visited the farm to shoot some photos of all of us. It was a great shoot, and the dogs (especially Lorenzo) were top-notch models. Lorenzo (who literally trembles and then hides in the bushes when we tell him it’s bath time) decided to swim in our pond (???!!!) for Frédéric. He performed some water ballet, waving his paws and flicking his tail, as if this kind of thing was perfectly normal.

Many thanks to Real Simple, Fréderic, and Yacob for the photos. I hope they turn out well!

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By pigwhisperer, March 18, 2010

A wonderful review of The Seamstress in The Independent, a UK newspaper. The book’s paperback version was released by Bloomsbury in February of 2010. Here’s the review’s full text:

“Although this is Frances de Pontes Peebles’ first novel, her prose flows with the assuredness of a natural storyteller’s. Each sentence of her epic narrative is stitched with meaning and insight, and the reader’s imagination is woven into the novel from the very first paragraph

We begin in 1935 in Recife, Brazil, where the married Emilia lives in the largest house in an area of newly built estates. She is living a life which at one time she could only dream of. But dreams, as she will learn, come at a price.

As orphaned children, Emilia and her deformed sister Luiza were brought up in a hillside village under the care of their Aunt Sofia. They worked as seamstresses, yearning to find a thread to take them away to a world elsewhere. Interwoven with their personal adventures is a slice of the fraught Brazilian history of the 1920s and 1930s: the economy is fast unravelling, and unrest and a clamouring for the rights of women are spreading as people attempt to fabricate feasible lives for themselves. The challenge facing Emilia and Luiza is how not to compromise their loyalties to themselves, and, most crucially, to each other.”

Here’s a link to the actual review. Many thanks to Bloomsbury for offering the book in the UK!

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By pigwhisperer, February 14, 2010

For Valentine’s Day, some excerpts of letters between Franz Kafka and his fiancé, Felice Bauer. They had a five-year relationship carried out mostly through letters, and were engaged twice.

Hoje é Dia dos Namorados nos EUA. Para comemorar, trechos da correspondência de Franz Kafka com Felice Bauer. Eles eram noivos para 5 anos e, durante seu noivado, tiveram uma correspondência de mais de 700 páginas. (Só achei trechos das cartas em inglês, infelizmente.)

In 1912, Kafka wrote to Bauer about how she had become inseparable from his work, and also how anticipation of her writing kept him awake at night. He wrote:

“Lately I have found to my amazement how intimately you have now become associated with my writing, although until recently I believe that the only time I did not think about you at all was while I was writing. In one short paragraph I had written, there were, among others, the following references to you and your letters: someone was give a bar of chocolate. There was talk of small diversions someone had during working hours. Then there was a telephone call. And finally somebody urged someone to go to bed, and threatened to take him straight to his room if he did not obey, which was certainly prompted by the recollection of your mother’s annoyance when you stayed so late at the office. — Such passages are especially dear to me; in them I take hold of you, without your feeling it, and therefore without your having to resist.

Eleven days later, Kafka wrote to her:
“Fraulein Felice!
I am now going to ask you a favour which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well this is it: Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them.
For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?”