r.vivian literary agency

Marta Cai's writing is difficult to classify: one can only be taken aback by the novelties of style, thought, approach, relationship between the word and the meaning that emerges from it. The unusual mix of intelligence and sensoriality, the mirroring between syntactic progression and perceptive gestures of this author who recently moved from Italy to Brazil gives us these "Brasilampi", texts that recall the so-called "chronicles", short compositions without genre, epiphanies of everyday life or reflections on the greatest systems where everything is allowed except the obvious, solidly present in Brazilian literature but not so codified in Europe. Marta Cai (a "psychogeographic" and "situated" writer) does not tell us about Brazil, does not force it into categories, descriptions, interpretations, but on the contrary and with absolute respect lets it permeate her. She thus reaches a fascinating space, both geographical and interior. She enters (and we with her) an ancestral clearing: that of non-comprehension, of the preverbal impact with the existent. She records in its presence, like a highly sensitive seismograph, her native illuminations, as if they were babblings (while instead they are dizzying lexical and syntactic acrobatics). Thus from Brazil unexpected flashes flash, expertly set up in a hidden, but powerful, circular, omnipresent structure. We cannot call them "stories", although they are populated by characters caught in peculiar moments; we cannot call them "chapters of a novel", although the author composes them in a unitary narrative arc; we cannot call them "sketches", although the writer proceeds here too, as in her previous works ("Enti di ragione", SuiGeneris, 2019 and "Centomilioni", Einaudi, 2023), with rapid angles, unexpected divarications, unpredictable core samplings in the depths. We can call them “Brasilampi”, and so we will.