Invitation | Presentation of «Hotel La Solitude» in Chaves

Trás-os-Montes, and Chaves in particular, form the landscape setting where the action of Hotel La Solitude unfolds. It therefore made perfect sense to hold a presentation in the very city that inspired the book.

I will be in Chaves on December 12th, at 5:30 PM, in conversation with Maria Isabel Viçoso, coordinator of the Grupo Cultural Aquae Flaviae, at the Municipal Library. We will discuss the physical space of the work as well as other, more hidden aspects, where real life is reflected in the pages.

Entrance is free.

Location: Municipal Library of Chaves

Reading of the month

In Thomas the Obscure, Maurice Blanchot does not guide the reader through a story but through a state. The work does not narrate; it prepares an experience. What is at stake is not the sequence of events but the slow erosion of the self as centre, the opening of a suspended space where consciousness splinters and the subject ceases to be the safe ground of itself. This is not pure loss but displacement: the self becomes margin, interval, a zone of instability between presence and absence.

This state finds resonance in what Clarice Lispector, in Água Viva, calls the “state of grace”: not an explicable illumination but a formless intensity, a moment in which life perceives itself without arranging itself into narrative. It is clarity without an object, a perception that does not grasp but is itself traversed. It is not knowledge; it is contact, an ontological truth.

The book’s central tension emerges from this demand for radical stripping-away:

“For lifetimes he needed to polish his thought, to free it from everything that makes of it a miserable bazaar, the mirror that looks at itself, the prism with an interior sun: he needed a self without its glass solitude, without that eye that has long been marked by strabismus, the eye whose supreme beauty lies in twisting as far as possible, the eye of the eye, the thought of thought.”

What Thomas seeks is not a firmer identity but liberation from the gaze closed upon itself. He longs for a thinking no longer obsessed with its own reflection, a self without the glass solitude, without the mirror’s tyranny. His movement is not one of building but of wearing-down. He does not wish to accumulate; he wishes to subtract. He wants to reach a point at which thinking ceases to be appropriation and becomes passage.

In his recent Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness, António Damásio notes that consciousness is always subjective and specific to each person, structured by the feelings that form the “feeling mind.” Blanchot inverts this process: he dissolves the reflective-linguistic self in order to return to the primordial experience of feeling, before any organization or mediation by the subject. This is not science but literature staging the decentering of the self, allowing the reader to touch a pure, singular and unrepeatable sensation.

It is on this threshold that Anne, the female figure, appears. Her drift does not point to death as cessation but to an indistinct zone where life no longer shapes itself into clear boundaries. She inhabits the edge, that unstable space where being lets go of its familiar forms, and there, precisely there, Thomas senses her as true for the first time. Not a richer identity but a barer one. Not a more consistent character but an irreducible presence.

Between Thomas and Anne there is no true dialogue but a kind of silent resonance. They do not meet in language but in the interstices of consciousness. They move forward in parallel motions of decentering. Each of Thomas’s thoughts seems to echo in Anne’s presence and absence, as if both inhabited the same interval without ever truly sharing it. What binds them is not closeness but a kind of neighborhood in the void.

Writing Thomas the Obscure was, undoubtedly, an extreme gesture. Language is always too little, too short, too fragile for the experience the text is trying to reach. Words cannot hold that experience; they fail. And in that failure the book finds its truth. Blanchot does not explain the dissolution of the self; he performs it. He turns each sentence into a body that twists, folds in on itself, and approaches its own disappearance. The writing does not point to the limit; it becomes the limit.

The novel offers no answers, no conclusions. It offers vertigo. It delivers the reader to instability, forcing him to lose his usual bearings and to relinquish the illusion of a centre. The self appears not as substance but as instant, as suspension, as opening. There is an edge of being that the text does not name but makes perceptible. There, life does not organise; it pulses. And in that brief, almost unbearable moment, the impossible is touched.

«Hotel La Solitude» in Braga

I felt very comfortable at the presentation in Braga. I spoke about the backstage of my creative process, about the way photography and architecture insinuate themselves into the writing and shape it.

I want to thank Dr Aida Alves, Dr Maria Noronha and the entire team at the Lúcio Craveiro da Silva Library for the warm welcome, Eduarda Ferreira for the wonderful readings, and Ângela Moreira and Sílvia Alvadia for their support with the organization.

Many thanks to everyone who was there. It was good to see friends I hadn’t met in a long time.