Poetics of a literary debut

Abstract

The first novel —the first and only or the first of many— has an even greater significance, perhaps, than what is regarded as a letter of introduction from the person who writes it. It is not only a test laboratory in which resources and discourses are handled with the intuition of someone who walks down a dark corridor towards a spot of light, flickering in the distance, but also a test in itself. On the materiality of the literary intention, on the ability to cultivate a meaning. On possibility.

There is something restorative and rebellious about returning to it. (Temporary and creative) distance provides the calm required to analyse the motives and intentions of that initiatory text, now free from the shadow of reception. Here is an approach to the birth of Quérote. Eu tampouco. My approach to writing, we might say.