Julho 01, 2013
Title: Stories without Gardens
Text: Jorge Palinhos
Illustration: Alexandre Siqueira
Bairro dos Livros Collection
Edition: 1st, July of 2013
ISBN: 978-989-97809-8-9
Summary: “She did not want to be loved, hunted down or adopted. Just be seen”. This is a character. And there is another one that “would leave before people got tired of her”. And yet another that knew “that time and quietness would ease her pain”.
Characters from tales that are Stories without Gardens and with love. Even if it’s the unmeasured one. Stories by Jorge Palinhos, that freely tell us about love addictions, because there is such a thing. By the end of many love affairs and relationships that can eat you away, from Ivy Girl with the House to Nerve Woman with Bone Man, it ends up being Bean Woman who teaches us, as she did too, to discover self-love. But, of course, this is what we think. We, that also think that this book with illustrations by Alexandre Siqueira and edited by Cultureprint has endings with moral but no moralism. Is that even possible? It’s always those endings of thirteen stories that leave us hanging and thinking: Fish Boy “loves and the next second no longer loves what he has loved”. Um… Professor Seagull, Sparrow Girl and Doctor Sunflower fit the way we were taught how to see things. How would the reader describe the mannerisms of a seagull, a sparrow, or a sunflower? Maybe the seagull would look at you sideways, the sparrow would hop on the ground searching for worms, and the sunflower would turn to itself. But, regardless of what we, as readers, may describe, after reading this book we will certainly have a second or even third outlook on animals and plants that around here pass as people. Let us begin today with tulips: “Sometimes, a petal would cry, which is how flowers lighten the weight on their heads”. Later, we will move on to people. – Nuno Santos, TKNT