Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, born in Luanda in 1970, is receiving the Formentor de las Letras prize. He learned of the award while reading or writing, with a book in hand, and soon began taking notes as he does daily. He described the recognition as one of the most important of his career, and used the occasion to warn about the direction of contemporary thought.
Tavares said society is close to "abdicating thought" and described artificial intelligence as the latest stage of a destructive trajectory that predates the technology, including mobile phones and other distractions. He said he avoids social media because it would absorb him, and argued that AI operates on the same principle at a higher level: if people stop thinking day after day and delegate the task to a machine, they will lose the ability to think. He called the risk one of becoming "intellectual tetraplegics." He added that he was good at mathematics but now would not know how to approach problems he could solve when he was young.
He left mathematics and football, where he had considered a professional career, for literature. He said he retains the discipline he learned in sport: as a child he liked playing in the rain and wind, often fell ill, and learned resistance and willpower, qualities he says society lacks. He writes instinctively, sometimes producing up to 20 pages in a morning without stopping, and revises the raw material one, two or five years later. Many of his books are not published until at least five years after they are written.
His novel O Fim dos Estados Unidos da América is due in Spanish in 2027 from Seix Barral. He wrote it in 2019 and says it anticipated Covid-19 as well as a split between rich and poor in the United States and the country's drift toward civil war. He said only the last of those has not happened, and that it is not far off. Tavares argued that one does not need to be an oracle to perceive that terrible things are coming, and that art, not only literature, can detect such endings. He said he does not consider the book entirely pessimistic because it uses humor.
The most recent of his books translated into Spanish is Las botas de Mussolini. He chose Mussolini's footwear because the boots disappeared after the dictator's death; they were special, he said, because Mussolini was small and they made him appear taller. Tavares imagines the boots are now in some room in the world, vibrating for new feet. He said fascism is returning without shame. The book is the first stone in a project he calls Historias fragmentadas del mundo, which returns to the 20th century to show how wars, pandemics and fascism repeat. He wrote it in verse, saying that different forms of writing reach different points and that rhythm helped him address historical violence.
In narrative, his latest work translated into Spanish is Mateo perdió el empleo. It begins with an unemployed man responding to a job advertisement. Tavares said high unemployment underlay many of the 20th century's disasters, including when Hitler won elections, and that violent tensions are not separate from the economy. The protagonist, out of work for a long time, will accept any job. Tavares warned that saying yes to everything in a desperate state is dangerous: a drowning person will grab the first buoy, regardless of whether it is sent by a lifeguard or a fascist.
He said history repeats itself. In the 20th century, the crash of 1929 helped collapse everything, and he fears 2029, though he acknowledged dates need not be exact. He sees history as cyclical, and warned that AI, which is already participating in political decisions, will be involved this time. At the award ceremony at the historic Hotel Formentor, he said writing should be understood as a way of leaving traces that allow people to orient themselves in a dangerous world. He described reading as a collective madness in which people create images in their heads from marks on a page, but said none is mad because when many are mad, none is. "We are too many with this madness but, luckily, we don't want to form an army," he said.
Sources: La Vanguardia.