BOOK / PRACTICAL MANUAL OF HATE. Ferréz

LITERATURE

The outskirts of any city (with some exceptions) are always left out of political projects, urbanization, and, therefore, of any cultural movement. It then becomes an untamed land whose inhabitants forge their own codes of survival and whose young people, eager for a form of expression, end up taking paths that art would not dare to take.

Reginaldo Ferreira da Silva (Ferréz) is one such young man. He grew up in a São Paulo favela, where he suffered hunger, where he learned the solidarity of his neighbors, and where he saw his friends become thieves or drug dealers, only to find them dead on a street corner or aged after years in prison. All this while carrying a book under his arm, like his only passport to unconditional freedom. From the favela, he learned the hard life, while from literature, he learned to portray reality.

In Practical Manual of Hate, the main character is Régis, a criminal with a humble past who finds himself swallowed up by the city's chaos. He starts out like everyone else: stealing, drinking alcohol, and fulfilling the sentence of his mother's employer: "So this kid will grow up one day and come rob my house?" He soon becomes the leader of a group of criminals planning a bank robbery. Success or failure matters little; what's truly important is trying to escape their poverty. If things don't work out, there's always the glory of having tried.

Ferréz claims that all the characters in this book lived in Capao Redondo, the favela where he grew up. Thus, this story isn't literature, it's a portrait of reality; the only difference between the tragedies of the upper class and those of the lower classes is that the former believe the social wall they've built protects them, while the latter assume all their unhappiness is due to money. However, in the end, both sides are wrong.

Title: Manual práctico del odio
Author: Ferréz
Pages: 110
Size: 17 x 24 cm
Weight: 350 grams
Genre: Literature
Language: Spanish
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Sur+
Year: 2014