excerpt
What really counts is the conquest of the longest youth, not the promise of immortality or the indefinite renewal of our cells. As if prolonging life wasn’t enough, biologists now want to manufacture life, design brains, controlling people’s thoughts.
synopsis
“Heresy – anything but being amortal” is a novel which talks about the death of the protagonist’s mother and the extension of her life as a result of the cultural and legal prohibition of assisted death. The book begins in the funeral of the narrator’s mother, in the coffin. In order to bare the funeral pain, the narrator uses a notebook and recalls what happened at the end of her mother’s life and her love story. The situation became even more challenging when the mother had a fracture and chose to undertake a surgery, despite the medical risks of the operation – she could die or lose her judgment capacities, a possible side effect of anesthesia at her age. The mother allowed the doctors to prolong her life, until she was no longer able to recognize herself, losing her self-consciousness due to her advanced age. The mother’s choice forced the daughter to be her mother’s mother. The narrator feels wronged, but she cannot make justice with her own hands. She needed to accept reality and write, to be able to separate herself from these traumatic events. Despite the necessary and modern reflections, Heresy is a novel that makes you laugh.
history
The book was launched on April 5th, in a Live Transmission with the participation of the literary critic Manuel da Costa Pinto and the executive editor of Record Publishing, Rodrigo Lacerda. In this debate, Betty Milan recalled actor Alain Delon’s recent request for assisted suicide and explained the meaning of the word “amortal”, the subtitle of her book. Amortal is the one who only dies by accident, unlike the immortal. The book release was filmed and can be found on Youtube (video). The press followed the events and spoke about the book with interest, publishing articles on Portal G1 and in the newspaper Valor (article).
opinion
A strong, courageous, timely and very surprising book by its development. Roberto
Roberto Schwarz
areas of interest
Literature and psychoanalysis.
critical reaction
“Heresy: Anything But being amortal” is the best book I have read about the inevitable ending, prescribed to all of us in every sense of the word: it is indeed like a prescription; it is prescribed, that is why we live as if we had obtained a habeas corpus in the face of death. It was prescribed, that is, predicted to come, as a prophecy coming true. Congratulations. It’s a high-quality book, you’ve improved the conciseness, made it simple and pure, as Cruz e Souza wanted, without losing the complex subtleties of the subject.
Deonísio da Silva
“I will attribute what I write to another narrator”, says the protagonist at the beginning of Heresy. The phrase brings a paradoxical presupposition in literature: moving away from what has been experienced, in order to better contemplate it. It delegates to a vicarious identity the task of reconnecting fiction to the impulse of knowledge. The tension between real and fiction becomes even more acute when the represented matter touches the exposed nerve of ethical and emotional dilemmas – as in this novel by Betty Milan, whose character deals with ambiguous feelings in the face of the decrepitude of her centenarian mother. The term “heresy” in the title, therefore, refers to an essentially contemporary question: is the extension of life by science legitimate, the perpetuation of an organic existence in which memory and subjectivity itself are extinguished? The novel brings an essayistic and metaliterary dimension that has always been present in Betty Milan’s work, but which has intensified since Consolação. and Eternal Mother, bringing the theme of loss in an auto-fictional way. Heresy enhances the theme, with a narrative within the narrative, in the form of journal in which the protagonist elaborates her farewell ceremony and describes (or imagines) the stories lived by her mother before of exile in the “imaginary palace” of amortality.
Manuel da Costa Pinto (book flap)