Updated: Oct 2
It is with great joy that I invite you to the launch of my first novel, Hotel La Solitude, which will take place on the 4th October, 5 pm at FNAC NorteShopping.
The presentation will be given by Sérgio Almeida.
I hope I can count on your presence for this very special occasion.
"I discovered that I am not disciplined by virtue, but only in reaction to my own negligence; that I appear generous to mask my meanness, that I am overly prudent from suspicion, that I am conciliatory to avoid succumbing to my repressed anger, that I am punctual only to conceal how little I care for other people’s time. In short, I discovered that love is not a state of the soul but a sign of the zodiac." — from Memories of My Melancholy Whores, by Gabriel García Márquez.
I read Memories of My Melancholy Whores without the enchantment I had expected from Márquez. The book felt gentle, almost self-forgetting, as if it were speaking already from a place of decline. At its core, there is no love story, only its idealisation. The old man invents an absolute love, yet one-sided. Delgadina never speaks to him, never returns his affection, never exists beyond silence. She is merely a sleeping body, material for his fantasy.
I now realise that the novel is more about the illusion of loving than love itself. It stages a shared imagination of Márquez’s generation — the male myth of pure love experienced without reciprocity, as if simply beholding female innocence could render one saved. There is no otherness, only projection. A love without reality, yet one that offers consolation at life’s end.
Perhaps this is why the book strikes me as so profoundly melancholic. It is not a celebration of love, but the portrait of a man who has never truly lived it, who, at the brink of death, invents it for himself. I underline the paragraph above, for at least the character saw and acknowledged the shadows. Even those of love.
Updated: Sep 16
It is with great joy that I announce that the Divino Salvador Church project is one of the 10 finalists of the International Prize for Sacred Architecture of the Frate Sole Foundation. The Winner of the VII edition of the International Prize for Sacred Architecture, will be voted by a second Jury composed by Tadao Ando, Cristian Undurraga and the President of the Frate Sole Foundation, Luigi Leoni, and will be announced in late July.
