Seven suggestions for the Book Fair

The Book of Five Thousand words
Lao tse
Assyrian & Alvim

Written in the sixth century before our era, this founding text of eastern philosophy comes not only in a new outfit but also with some « singularities » – as translator Joaquim M. Palma calls them – which « are absent in transcripts published in Western languages ​​in the last one hundred years. » If it were not an anachronism, we could say that we find in these pages a kind of stoicism, full of containment, wise advice and appeals to contempt for earthly goods. All this permeated by the meaning of the mystery that leads to enlightenment the one that decipher it. « The most flexible thing in the world fragments the hardest. Nothing penetrates what is compact. What has no substance enters the void. Thus, I understand the benefits of non-action. Teaching without words. A kind of timeless guide to guide ourselves in a confusing and tumultuous world.
Price 16.65 €

History of the Peloponnese War
You
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

In the time of various wars, this great classic shows us that in essential human nature has not evolved much over the last 2500 years. And that the fifth century AC, of ​​Pericles and Socrates, of democracy and philosophy, was not exempt from violent seizures. He himself man of arms (he was a Athenian general), you describe with remarkable objectivity what witnessed or heard firsthand the clash between Athens, the hegemonic power of ancient Greece, and spaced (and respective allies), started in 431 ACTIONS, Acts of Heroism, Grandiloquent Speechs and a good dose of slaughter: Monument of antiquity such as the theater of Epidaurus or the Partenon. With translation and introduction of the ‘rustic scholar’ Raul Rosado Fernandes.
Price 30 €

As gods entered men – a story of the rich in the West
Guido Alfani
Editions 70

Who are the rich? What defines them? How do they live and behave? And from what level can they consider as such? Without deifying or diaboralizing wealth, Guido Alfani evaluates the role and weight of the rich in societies, always with inequalities on the horizon. But it does not put them all in the same bag, because there are them for all tastes: _ The avares and lavators, the indolent and the entrepreneurs, the umbigists and the beneficial. The different ways of making fortune and the opportunities created by technological transformations are also subject to appreciation. This is a panoramic view of the rich in the West, by António Palas, an ancient slave whose peculio surpassed that of the Imperial Family of Rome, Silvio Berlusconi, passing through Medici and the Rothschild.
Price 37.90 €

At the time of my death
SEBASTIAN JUGER
Paper moon

He slaughtered large trees hanging on a nylon rope to dozens of meters from the floor. It was submerged by a succession of giant waves when surfing on a winter day. He was under fire as he covered the War of Afghanistan. He was in the hands of Ijaw combatants in the Niger Delta and one of them promised to kill him. By centimeters it was not hit by a taxi in Manhattan while riding on his bike. But his closest experience of death was at the door of his weekend home on June 16, 2020. A very strong pain in the belly gave the alert. In the nearest hospital, doctors diagnosed a massive abdominal bleeding whose origin were slow to identify. He was attached to life by a thread. And at one point, lying in the bed of intensive care, he saw his father, who died a few years earlier. “For the first time in life I was lying there to think of death. Not death in my terms – the accumulated energy of narrowly escaped to a dangerous situation, the sick relief of having naughty with luck – but in terms of it. The great well that contains everything and nothing, including my deceased, is not in a hurry. There, that’s all. Who is in a hurry is you, running from side to side, and then suddenly that well is swallowing you, and to the fourth and all the light in it. ”
Price 15.90 €

Accountant Account-Volumes I and II
Vergílio Ferreira
Quetzal

Whether by shame or any other reason, there is no consistent dia from a consistent tradition in Portugal. Vergílio Ferreira (1916-1996), the author of the appearance, constitutes Miguel Torga one of the rare exceptions to this absence. In his checking account, now reissued in two beautiful and imposing hardcover volumes (over a thousand pages each), the small incidences of everyday life appear (“I still with the book of Malraux”); Comments today (“more threatening political situation. MFA and PC understand each other”); Travel notes (“Immediately after landing go to the Dachau Concentration Field”); aphorisms (“We are a country of illiterate. Of these some do not know how to read”) and thoughts that make them think (“being superior is not only knowing or saying superior things: _ I have to see them from a superior point of view”). There is also a lot of poetry, gender that the author seems to cultivate without great conviction, but no less persistently. And, of course, meditations about the craft:_« (…) I feel frustrated and restless and discouraged, when I don’t write a romance. Because everything else is from the surroundings of whom I am, even if these surroundings are not uninteresting as they tell me of this diary. But it’s not the interest of others that tells me-it’s the interest to me. A novel mobilizes all of me for long months. And the rest is slightly a conversation. What is a diary? An attempt to stop the flow of time, a notebook to think out loud, a trail of the passage through the world, transforming into written matter the varied nuances of a life. The pages so many Vergílio Ferreira define his own: « I was in the habit of pouring into this crate the ideas that come to me and have no destiny. » From the moment they were published, they had.
Price 27.70 €

I love Russia
Elena Kostyuchenko
Themes and Debates

Dead soldiers, persecuted minorities, corrupt civil servants, cities dipped in pollution. In the tradition of reporters such as Ryszard Kapuscinski and Svetlana Alexievitch, this intrepid journalist moves to the places, asks, observes, listens to people and records everything. Of the hurt stories that serves us, an alternative portrait of this “puzzle wrapped in a mystery within a puzzle,” as Churchill called Russia, and also applies to Putin Russia. One of the texts is just a few lines: « In 2021, the Russian courts tried 783,000 people. Of these, exactly 2,190 were considered innocent. Two thousand one hundred and ninety. The probability of someone accused of a crime and being unlawful was 0.28%. » In this case they are just numbers. Almost always everything is told to the detail, by the voices of the protagonists. The courage of this journalist is amazing – and what tells us too.
Price 22.20 €

The crocodile
DOSTOIÉVSKI FIOR
Presence

It was no coincidence that Borges included this incomplete tale in the anthology of Russian tales of the Babel Library. « The environment is dream, about to fall into the nightmare, but never sinks into its many abysses thanks to the tone of humorism and the inconsistency and vulgarity of the protagonists, » wrote the Argentine author.
The absurd and the paradox, so cultivated and so pleased with Borges and Dostoevski himself, are with the comic and grotesque in this story of a civil servant who is swallowed by a crocodile on display. Who is the victim and who is the guilty of the incident?
The employee, the animal or the owner? But after the initial affliction, the man lets himself be, snuggled into the skin of the reptile that is after him like a glove. With translation of the Russian of Nina and Filipe Guerra.
Price 11.90 €