All Forms of Art

I decided to loosely translate this book’s title by myself because it’s an interesting novel from the Portuguese author João Ricardo Pedro and it hadn’t already been translated into English. It definitely should be though. Much of our Portuguese literature is marked by the oppressive government, so-called “New State” and this is one more of such books. The difference is that it isn’t about that time period, rather about the following decades and how the political police and the lack of development the dictatorship gave to Portuguese people influenced the next generations to come. The book is about a family, telling us stories of 3 different generations, all of them somehow marked by the dictatorship and the colonial war. The ones who lived it as an adult, those who lived it as a child and the ones who just heard stories about it. All of them had their lives shaped by this reality. So, we have Chronicles about a typical Portuguese family, a first generation living i...

After all the scandal surrounding the first season of the show, we’re offered an introduction where the actors talk about the issues the show might raise and advise the viewers about the fact that the show might not be adequate for them as well as cover how they should ask for help if any of these issues have crossed their mind. I liked that part, but then the story begins to unfold and I felt like the production team was just getting rid of any eventual future consequences that might land at their feet… Shockingly, in this season, Hanna Baker became a heroine, no matter how many times other characters would say that suicide was never a valid way out of any problems, the whole story is about the girl whose death was what it took to get everyone to step forward with their own troubles. She had to die for others to begin addressing violence, to stop and think about the consequences of their actions and that, in my humble opinion, is the wrong image or message to pass along t...