Paris welcomes us with open arms, hosted by the journalist and translator Rosa Freire d'Aguiar, who has just published “Semper Paris”, in which she reports on her life as a correspondent for major Brazilian newspapers and magazines in the French capital in the 1970s and 1980s years.
In these juicy memoirs, the author puts the spotlight on writers, artists and intellectuals with whom she had the privilege of entering into dialogue, but also comments in her own words on central themes of the time that recur today, such as, for example, the eternal conflict in… Gaza Strip.
Freire d'Aguiar recalls his first trip to the region in 1982 from Paris, when “Israeli colonization policies were causing further drama in the occupied territories, where since 1967 governments of whatever kind had upset the lives of Palestinians. “
“In Rafá, in the south of the Gaza Strip, I found the little girl Rollah, three years old, who had forgotten how to speak and only repeated alhudud border since the Israelis had erected a twometerhigh barbed wire fence in front of her house. height,” he writes.
It is interesting to think that Semper Paris was printed a month before a new conflict began in the region. Reading the reports and interviews in the book, one gets the impression that in all these years we have not left our place or, worse, have taken a step backwards.
“Semper Paris” depicts several important events in recent history that remain critically important. In 1981, the journalist interviewed the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato, who, when asked whether his generation's neglect and escapism had contributed to the country's situation, answered in the affirmative.
And he added: “It is true that we have reached this point in Argentina because many important men have refused to take part in political life. In Argentina, as in many other countries, the traditional idea has been that politics is dirty. Politics is real, and.” Reality is dirty. Only the Platonic world is clean.
However, the author believed that Argentina was tired of the military. But less than 50 years have passed and Argentines today defend the idea that only someone removed from politics can save the country. They also seem to have forgotten the disappearance and suppression of constitutional guarantees when they elected Javier Milei as president.
About the literary world, Freire d'Aguiar says that when she arrived in Paris there were published “no fewer than 150 supplements and literary magazines” that she tried to follow. He interviewed celebrities from this universe, such as Roland Barthes, Eugène Ionesco and Michel Serres, among other names that we still know today. Some interviews are unpublished, others were published in Brazil at the time.
Death and old age are highlighted in the interview with Ionesco. For the playwright, the last years of life are the most irritating, because “you already know everything you could know, which means you don't know anything and won't know anything else.” “It's terrible, it's unacceptable. And you’re still alive, you don’t want to go.”
The theme seems fashionable in contemporary Brazilian literature, but perhaps without the depth and humor characteristic of Ionesco.
Two women interviewed by the author draw attention to themselves. Élisabeth Badinter, “an active voice of feminism in the 1960s”, caused a stir by questioning the naturalness of maternal love another theme that should be highlighted and that returned in contemporary writings as something completely new and original . The other is Simone Veil, who was health minister in France in the 1970s and fought for the legalization of abortion and other causes that guaranteed women's freedom.
“Semper Paris” confirms in practice the theory of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico: History is circular and spiral circular because it always repeats itself, and spiral because it never repeats itself in quite the same way. At the end of reading, the adverb “always” in the title seems Viconic