Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing - Novel

O texto seguinte servirá de base para responder à questão.

 

Book Review: Torto Arado

 

Itamar Vieira Júnior's searing novel has captivated Brazil's literary scene.

 

SÃO PAULO − In 1888, Brazil became the last country to abolish slavery in the Americas. But for many of those who had been considered possessions, emancipation brought little change. More than 130 years later, some in the remote, semi-arid hinterland of Brazil's northeast live under arrangements that seem a holdover from the era of slavery, without access to education, a permanent home, or ownership of the land they have worked for generations.

 

This region, known as the sertão , is the setting for Torto Arado, the bestselling 2018 novel by geographer-turned-writer Itamar Vieira Júnior. The land is a conspicuous presence on every page of the book, whose title translates to Crooked Plow. Dust covers the characters' bodies and few belongings after a day of hard labor in the fields. Mud is used to build the walls of their temporary huts. The earth fills their mouths, takes their dead children, and is their only means of survival.

 

The world is already taking note of Vieira Júnior. Torto Arado also won a prize in Italy, and publishing rights have been sold in nine countries. The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts awarded a grant to Montclair State University Professor Johnny Lorenz to translate the novel into English, and a production company has acquired the rights to make a series or film for a streaming service.

 

Humble origins make Vieira Júnior's international success appear still more impressive. While studying at the Federal University of Bahia, supported by a scholarship for low-income Black students, he worked as a clerk at a grocery store and pharmacy before taking a post as a researcher at the national land reform agency. Vieira Júnior then spent 15 years crisscrossing the vast states of Bahia and Maranhão, spending long periods among rural laborers. These travels provided the material for Torto Arado, written discreetly over several decades. 

FONTANA, Camila. Book Review: Torto Arado. Americas Quarterly, Culture, 19 out. 2021.

Disponível em: . Acesso em: 19 nov. 2023. (Adaptado).

What contributed to Itamar Vieira Júnior's inspiration for his novel "Torto Arado"?

Stephen King’s First Book Is 50 Years Old, and Still Horrifyingly Relevant

 

    Stephen King’s “Carrie” burst upon
an astonished world in 1974. It made King’s
career. It has sold millions, made millions,
inspired four films and passed from generation
[5] to generation. It was, and continues to be, a
phenomenon.
    “Carrie” was King’s first published
novel. Failing to convince himself, King
scrunched up the few pages he’d written and
[10] tossed them into the garbage. But his wife,
Tabitha — a dauntless soul, and evidently of a
curious temperament — fished them out,
uncrinkled them, read them, and famously
convinced King to continue the story. She

[15] wanted to know how it would come out, and
such desires on the part of readers are perhaps
the best motivation a writer can have.
    King proceeded. The novel grew into
a book with many voices. First, of course, there
[20] is Carrie herself: Picked on by her religious
fanatic of a mother, by her fellow high school
students and by the entire town of
Chamberlain, Maine, she is clumsy, yearning,
pimply, ignorant and, by the end, vengefully
[25] telekinetic. But we also hear from the next-

door neighbor who witnessed a violent display
of the toddler Carrie’s telekinetic
manifestations; from various journalistic
pieces, in Esquire and in local papers, about
[30] Carrie’s unusual powers and the destruction of
the town by fire and flood; from Ogilvie’s
Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena and from an
article in a science yearbook (“Telekinesis:
Analysis and Aftermath”); from Susan Snell, the
[35] only one of Carrie’s female classmates to
attempt to atone for the wrongs they did to
her; and from the academic paper “The Shadow
Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific
Conclusions Derived From the Case of Carietta
[40] White.”
    Then there are the inner voices of
various other characters, as overheard by
Carrie, who toward the end of her life becomes
telepathic and can listen in on the silent
[45] thoughts of others, as well as broadcasting her
inner life to them. Together, the many voices
tell the horrifying tale.
    What is it about “Carrie” that has
intrigued me? It’s one of those books that
[50] manage to dip into the collective unconscious
of their own age and society.
    Female figures with quas-

isupernatural powers seem to pop up in
literature at times when the struggle for
[55] women’s rights comes to the fore. H. Rider
Haggard’s “She” appeared toward the end of
the 19th century, when pressure for more
equality was building; its electrically gifted
heroine can kill with a pointed finger and a
[60] thought, and much verbiage is expended on
male anxieties about what might happen —
especially to men — should She-Who-Must-Be-

Obeyed train her sights on world domination.
    “Carrie” was written in the early
[65] 1970s, when the second-wave women’s
movement was at full throttle. There are a
couple of nods to this new form of feminism in
the novel, and King himself has said that he
was nervously aware of its implications for men
[70] of his generation. The male villain of “Carrie,”
Billy Nolan, is a throwback to the swaggering
hair-oiled tough-male posturing of the 1950s,

which is seen as already outmoded, though still
dangerous.
[75]     “Carrie White” is an interesting
combination. “Carrie,” as King takes pains to
point out, is not a nickname for Carol or
Carolina. Carrie’s given name is “Carietta,” an
unusual variant of “Caretta,” itself derived from
[80] “caritas,” or “charity” — loving and forgiving
kindness, the most important virtue in the
Christian triad of faith, hope and charity. This
kind of charity is noteworthily lacking in most
of the townspeople of Chamberlain. (Yes, there
[85] is a real Chamberlain, Maine, and I wonder how
its inhabitants felt when they discovered in
1974 that they’d be obliterated in 1979, the
year in which “Carrie” is set.)
    Most particularly, charitable loving
[90] kindness is entirely absent from Carrie’s
mother, nominally a devoted Christian, who
knows about Carrie’s superpowers, believes
she has inherited them from an eldritch, sugar-

bowl-levitating grandmother, and ascribes
[95] them to demonic energies and witchcraft, thus
viewing it as her pious duty to murder her own
child. Carrie herself wavers between love and
forgiveness and hate and revenge, but it’s the
hatred of the town that channels itself through
[100] her, tips her over the edge and transforms her
into an angel of destruction.
    As for “White,” you might be inclined
to think “white hat, black hat,” as in westerns,
or “white” as in innocent, white-clothed
[105] sacrificial lamb, and yes, Carrie is an innocent
— but also please consider “white trash.” The
white underclass has existed in America from
the beginning, and white trashers going back
generations are thick on the ground in Maine,
[110] Stephen King’s home territory — a territory he
has mined extensively over the course of his
career.
     He based the situation of Carrie on
two girls from that underclass whom he knew
[115] at school, both of them marked by poverty and
decaying clothing, both of them taunted and
despised and destroyed by their fellow
students. Everyone in the town was an
underdog in the carefully calibrated class
[120] structure of America — not for them the fancy
private schools and university educations,
unless they got really, really lucky.
    King is a visceral writer, and a master
of granular detail. As Marianne Moore said, the
[125] literary ideal is “imaginary gardens with real
toads in them,” and boy, are there a lot of
toads in King’s work! He writes “horror,” the
most literary of forms, especially when it
comes to the supernatural, which must 

[130] perforce be inspired by already existing tales
and books.
    But underneath the “horror,” in King,
is always the real horror: the all-too-actual
poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse that
[135] exists in America today. The ultimate horror,
for him as it was for Dickens, is human cruelty,
and especially cruelty to children. It is this that
distorts “charity,” the better side of our nature,
the side that prompts us to take care of others.

Adapted from: www.nytimes.com /2024/03/25

In the sentence “King scrunched up the few pages he’d written and tossed them into the garbage.”, (lines 08-10) the verb tenses are respectively

Stephen King’s First Book Is 50 Years Old, and Still Horrifyingly Relevant

 

    Stephen King’s “Carrie” burst upon
an astonished world in 1974. It made King’s
career. It has sold millions, made millions,
inspired four films and passed from generation
[5] to generation. It was, and continues to be, a
phenomenon.
    “Carrie” was King’s first published
novel. Failing to convince himself, King
scrunched up the few pages he’d written and
[10] tossed them into the garbage. But his wife,
Tabitha — a dauntless soul, and evidently of a
curious temperament — fished them out,
uncrinkled them, read them, and famously
convinced King to continue the story. She

[15] wanted to know how it would come out, and
such desires on the part of readers are perhaps
the best motivation a writer can have.
    King proceeded. The novel grew into
a book with many voices. First, of course, there
[20] is Carrie herself: Picked on by her religious
fanatic of a mother, by her fellow high school
students and by the entire town of
Chamberlain, Maine, she is clumsy, yearning,
pimply, ignorant and, by the end, vengefully
[25] telekinetic. But we also hear from the next-

door neighbor who witnessed a violent display
of the toddler Carrie’s telekinetic
manifestations; from various journalistic
pieces, in Esquire and in local papers, about
[30] Carrie’s unusual powers and the destruction of
the town by fire and flood; from Ogilvie’s
Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena and from an
article in a science yearbook (“Telekinesis:
Analysis and Aftermath”); from Susan Snell, the
[35] only one of Carrie’s female classmates to
attempt to atone for the wrongs they did to
her; and from the academic paper “The Shadow
Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific
Conclusions Derived From the Case of Carietta
[40] White.”
    Then there are the inner voices of
various other characters, as overheard by
Carrie, who toward the end of her life becomes
telepathic and can listen in on the silent
[45] thoughts of others, as well as broadcasting her
inner life to them. Together, the many voices
tell the horrifying tale.
    What is it about “Carrie” that has
intrigued me? It’s one of those books that
[50] manage to dip into the collective unconscious
of their own age and society.
    Female figures with quas-

isupernatural powers seem to pop up in
literature at times when the struggle for
[55] women’s rights comes to the fore. H. Rider
Haggard’s “She” appeared toward the end of
the 19th century, when pressure for more
equality was building; its electrically gifted
heroine can kill with a pointed finger and a
[60] thought, and much verbiage is expended on
male anxieties about what might happen —
especially to men — should She-Who-Must-Be-

Obeyed train her sights on world domination.
    “Carrie” was written in the early
[65] 1970s, when the second-wave women’s
movement was at full throttle. There are a
couple of nods to this new form of feminism in
the novel, and King himself has said that he
was nervously aware of its implications for men
[70] of his generation. The male villain of “Carrie,”
Billy Nolan, is a throwback to the swaggering
hair-oiled tough-male posturing of the 1950s,

which is seen as already outmoded, though still
dangerous.
[75]     “Carrie White” is an interesting
combination. “Carrie,” as King takes pains to
point out, is not a nickname for Carol or
Carolina. Carrie’s given name is “Carietta,” an
unusual variant of “Caretta,” itself derived from
[80] “caritas,” or “charity” — loving and forgiving
kindness, the most important virtue in the
Christian triad of faith, hope and charity. This
kind of charity is noteworthily lacking in most
of the townspeople of Chamberlain. (Yes, there
[85] is a real Chamberlain, Maine, and I wonder how
its inhabitants felt when they discovered in
1974 that they’d be obliterated in 1979, the
year in which “Carrie” is set.)
    Most particularly, charitable loving
[90] kindness is entirely absent from Carrie’s
mother, nominally a devoted Christian, who
knows about Carrie’s superpowers, believes
she has inherited them from an eldritch, sugar-

bowl-levitating grandmother, and ascribes
[95] them to demonic energies and witchcraft, thus
viewing it as her pious duty to murder her own
child. Carrie herself wavers between love and
forgiveness and hate and revenge, but it’s the
hatred of the town that channels itself through
[100] her, tips her over the edge and transforms her
into an angel of destruction.
    As for “White,” you might be inclined
to think “white hat, black hat,” as in westerns,
or “white” as in innocent, white-clothed
[105] sacrificial lamb, and yes, Carrie is an innocent
— but also please consider “white trash.” The
white underclass has existed in America from
the beginning, and white trashers going back
generations are thick on the ground in Maine,
[110] Stephen King’s home territory — a territory he
has mined extensively over the course of his
career.
     He based the situation of Carrie on
two girls from that underclass whom he knew
[115] at school, both of them marked by poverty and
decaying clothing, both of them taunted and
despised and destroyed by their fellow
students. Everyone in the town was an
underdog in the carefully calibrated class
[120] structure of America — not for them the fancy
private schools and university educations,
unless they got really, really lucky.
    King is a visceral writer, and a master
of granular detail. As Marianne Moore said, the
[125] literary ideal is “imaginary gardens with real
toads in them,” and boy, are there a lot of
toads in King’s work! He writes “horror,” the
most literary of forms, especially when it
comes to the supernatural, which must 

[130] perforce be inspired by already existing tales
and books.
    But underneath the “horror,” in King,
is always the real horror: the all-too-actual
poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse that
[135] exists in America today. The ultimate horror,
for him as it was for Dickens, is human cruelty,
and especially cruelty to children. It is this that
distorts “charity,” the better side of our nature,
the side that prompts us to take care of others.

Adapted from: www.nytimes.com /2024/03/25

A curious thing about “Carrie” is the fact that Stephen King

Text

 

Torto Arado by Itamar Vieira Júnior: The Fight for Land Rights in Brazil’s Northeast

By Isaac Norris – 24 February, 2021

 

    Itamar Vieira Júnior is a writer from Brazil’s north-eastern state of Bahia. His multi awardwinning debut novel Torto Arado (Crooked Plough) is a beautifully written tour de force that unflinchingly gives a voice to the country’s silenced Black, Indigenous and Quilombola communities who have been fighting for their land rights for hundreds of years. ‘Quilombolas’ is the name for residents of Quilombos: settlements originally formed by fugitive slaves. There are roughly 3,000 Quilombos in Brazil today.

    Vieira Júnior is a writer who has experienced first-hand many of the themes explored in Torto Arado. Over the past 15 years, he has worked for Brazil’s land reform agency INCRA (National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform), which led him to live intimately with the Quilombola communities depicted in the novel, getting to know their stories, rituals and struggles.

    The novel has been making waves on the literary scene both at home and abroad, and it is very deserving of the many accolades it has won. When Torto Arado was first published in Portugal in 2018, it won the LeYa Prize, Portugal’s most prestigious literary prize. And in 2020, Vieira Júnior won two awards: he received a Jabuti Prize, the most traditional and prestigious literary prize in Brazil; and the Oceanos Prize, one of the most important literary prizes for books in the Portuguese language.

Source: https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/brazil/torto-arado-by-itamar-vieira-junior-the-fight-for-land-rights-in-brazils-northeast-58417. [Adapted].

 

According to text, it is correct to say that:

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

 

        An invigorating reading

    His grandparents were slaves. His father painted houses. His immigrant mother washed laundry. For a poor, mixed-race boy born in Brazil in 1839, their son had done well to become an apprentice typesetter in Rio de Janeiro. But a priest taught him Latin, and a literary agent spotted the gifted lad at the Imprensa Nacional, the government press, and soon he was contributing to newspapers, writing plays and poems and starting a literary circle.

    But it was as a novelist that Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis would truly shine. Machado worked as a civil servant and co-founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters; he married happily (although his Portuguese in-laws initially objected to the colour of his skin). Beneath all this outward respectability, his prose was radically ingenious. Ever since “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”, Machado’s fifth novel, appeared in 1881 it has astonished readers with its lordly ironies and scorn for convention. The book’s invigorating style, as much as its backdrop of racial and social injustice, makes it ideal reading for this morbid, insurgent summer.

    Brás Cubas, the fictional memoirist, has just died from pneumonia. As a thwarted corpse who failed in almost everything he tried, he wants to set the record straight about his drifting life as an idle, pleasure-seeking dandy in Rio. Beneath his jaunty veneer, Cubas harbours a melancholy pessimism. He sees a freedman lash a slave he has bought — to relieve his own sufferings “by passing them on to someone else”. Yet the novel floats free of the ambient oppression on currents of mischief and urbanity.

    Sprinkled with epigrams, dreams, gags and asides, the story teases, dances and delights. Across 160 short chapters (“Long chapters suit long-winded readers”), Machado mocks every rule of the 19th-century novel. A chapter of dialogue is written entirely in punctuation (“!…?…!”). In another, the narrator acknowledges (in a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson), “I have just written an utterly pointless chapter”. Dave Eggers, an American author, recently called this “one of the wittiest, most playful, and therefore most alive and ageless books ever written”.

(www.economist.com, 15.08.2020. Adaptado.)

No trecho do terceiro parágrafo “Yet the novel floats free of the ambient oppression on currents of mischief and urbanity”, o termo sublinhado expressa

    We walked on, the stranger walking with us. Taylor Franklin Bankole. Our last names an instant bond between us. We’re both descended from men who assumed African surnames back during the 1960s. His father and my grandfather had had their names legally changed, and both had chosen Yoruba replacement names.

    “Most people chose Swahili names in the ’60s”, Bankole told me. He wanted to be called Bankole. “My father had to do something different. All his life he had to be different”.

    “I don’t know my grandfather’s reasons”, I said. “His last name was Broome before he changed it, and that was no loss’. But why he chose Olamina…? Even my father didn’t know. He made the change before my father was born, so my father was always Olamina, and so were we.

BUTLER, O. E. Parable of the Sower. New York: Hachette, 2019 (adaptado).

 

Nesse trecho do romance Parable of the Sower, os nomes “Bankole” e “Olamina” representam o(a)