How do Joao and the seminarist learn to know each other during the narration?
They have already met at the beginning of the novel. But later the seminarist tells that he had met João, il Rosso, casually when he was visiting the prison. But they really meet, definitely and in terms of affection, long after João had started to tell his tragic story to the seminarist.
And Joao in the end will know himself?
João tells his story only to get to know himself. He tells his own story at an attempt to understand the reason why he committed his terrible crime. And the seminarist tells to the reader the story of João, feeling more and more close to João as he listen to him.
Possible to find in them something in common?
Yes. João doesn’t get along with his own son and as the conversation progresses ends up finding in the seminarist a kind of a son. About the same happens with the seminarist, who doesn’t get along with his own father.
Yes. Because life itself is a play, the world is a stage and both can be resumed in football in general and in a football match in a restricted way. João, as a coach, fells himself as a theatre director and sees in the football fields where he plays, provisory stages where the fight of existence unfolds.
Do you like the football? DAre you watching the World Cup...?
Of course. I love football and I suffered a lot with football since my early years and only because of that he became the theme of “L’ultimo minuto”. I use to write only about the things, which make me suffer because the happy events let me in life itself, they don’t make me try to understand artistically what is going on. We don’t turn ourselves into moral beings unless we find ourselves unhappy. Of course I am watching the World Cup and I hope, sincerely, that Brazil had learnt a lesson with the German earthquake.
A remark about the matchs Brazil-Germany and Brazil-Netherlands...
The matchs made it clear that the problem of Brazil wasn’t just the spine of Neymar, but the fact that the whole Brazilian team - as the Brazilian football as a whole - didn’t have a spinal column.
What country is there in the book setting?
I write about many countries, even Russia and Switzerland, and sure about Italy, but the main setting is Brazil. Everything starts at João’s childhood in the south of Brazil, a region of European immigration, moves to Rio de Janeiro, where João, il Rosso, commits his crime while working as a football coach, but during his escape I try to present an image of the whole country with his recent transformations and insolved problems. Giovanni Zambito.
Intervista del 13 luglio 2014.
© RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA
Marcelo Backes. Nato nel 1973 a Campina das Missões, nel Brasile meridionale, ha studiato giornalismo, letteratura brasiliana e germanistica, e tradotto e curato l’edizione di più di una ventina di classici della letteratura tedesca e internazionale, tra cui Goethe, Schiller, Kafka, Schnitzler, Nietzsche. Come autore, ha al suo attivo due romanzi e una collezione di aforismi, epigrammi e frammenti narrativi. È considerato uno dei più promettenti autori brasiliani contemporanei ed è stato paragonato dalla critica al grande Guimarães Rosa.
