Books may or may not change our lives, but they have certainly changed the city of Paraty, in Brazil. The literary festival created there 12 years ago is a massive success.
It all started as William Wordsworth’s poetry begins – romantic and, some would say, delusional ideas beginning to flourish in the heads of a group of people. The goal was to create a literary event in a charming city in Brazil, a beautiful small place by the sea between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. That place is named Paraty.
Liz Calder, a prominent British editor, was the brains, the one who had the idea, the know-how and the necessary contacts to enrich the festival with a number of Nobel Prize, Booker and Pulitzer Prize winning authors.
Mauro Munhoz, an architect, and Luiz Schwarcz, a Brazilian editor, were the perfect local partners. The three of them had the most important of things in common: an unconditional love for Paraty. None of them were born there, but they all discovered and kept going back to it over the course of their lives.
In 2003, after years of preparation, they started the Paraty International Literary Festival (FLIP in the Portuguese abbreviation).
It was the beginning of what could have been an exemplar short story, in the style of those written by Anton Tchekhov or Flannery O’Connor. The first year of the festival paid tribute to one of the most remarkable Brazilian artists of the 20th century, Vinicius de Moraes. Among the other guests brought to Paraty was the great historian Eric Hobsbawm, and one year later, Paul Auster and Martin Amis added their names to the list of guest writers.
In the following editions, authors such as Orhan Pamuk, Toni Morrison, Amoz Oz, J.M. Coetzee, António Lobo Antunes, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan all visited Paraty. These names and many others bring us to where we are now: the 12th edition of a literary festival that has changed a city by involving the whole community.
Rock festival
Paraty was once an important harbour for the trade of slaves and gold, during the centuries of Portuguese colonization in Brazil. On this particular summer’s day, looking at the well-preserved streets of this historical city during the days of FLIP, one could be forgiven for thinking that there’s some large-scale music festival going on.
With thousands of people walking around, every single coffee shop, restaurant and even private houses are involved, selling candy, drinks, souvenirs and more.
The curator for the 2014 edition of the festival, Paulo Werneck, made the music concert comparison during a press conference on the last day of the event.
“It’s almost like a rock festival”, he said, aptly describing in one sentence the vibe that the crowd of 25,000 people who visited Paraty during four days at beginning of August made him feel.
Instead of rock stars however, there are writers. And instead of music, they sell books. Paraty has just a few bookshops, but during the festival you can find titles almost everywhere. FLIP sets-up a large temporary bookshop where it’s possible to find all the works of the guest authors, either in Portuguese or in other languages, such as English and French. At other venues, different FLIP partners or independent associations organize parallel events, from music concerts to arts exhibitions – smaller festivals inside the major one.
A long story
Twelve years since its inaugural event, there’s no doubt that FLIP was meant to be an extensive novel, rather than a short story. In the tradition of storytellers like João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Roberto Bolaño and Leo Tolstoi, this festival’s long and exquisite narrative is being written year after year.
Contrary to many other editions of FLIP, the 2014 festival had no Nobel Prize winning writers amongst the guests. Nonetheless, Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri; Eleanor Catton, the youngest Man Booker Prize winner; food guru Michael Pollan; prominent American writer Andrew Solomon; and the much appreciated Israeli author Etgar Keret were some of the most noticeable guests attending.
But there was one man whose presence could be felt everywhere: Millor Fernandes, the Brazilian cartoonist, writer, humourist and intellectual who passed away in 2012. FLIP decided to pay homage to him this time, by having an exhibition of his works, several roundtables about him and a number of publications made available.
Different topics, from the Indian cause in Brazil to the times of dictatorship in the country; from freedom of expression to the relationship between literature, power and other forms of art – all was discussed in the Author’s Tent, with each session attended by an audience of 850 people.
Outside the Author’s Tent, giant LCD screens displayed every session, making them available to a wider audience. Hundreds of people sat there, watching and waiting for the moment when they could line-up and get an autograph from one of those women and men of letters they all seem to admire.
And kids were not forgotten either, with Flipinha (Little Flip) and FlipZona (FlipZone) offering a large number of activities for children and teenagers.
Architect Mauro Munhoz, FLIP’s director, attended most of the events and declared himself “very happy with the turnout” of this year’s festival.
Apart from the literary sessions, the festival also has a strong connection with the city’s social atmosphere, urban planning and heritage preservation, something Munhoz really cherishes.
Like diving into a Charles Dickens novel (or Machado de Assis, to mention one of the greatest Brazilian writers of all times), one can discover in Paraty and FLIP a time-travel experience to another era – not only the era that the streets may remind you of, but an era where books were popular and desired, and where authors were respected and admired. That era, in Brazil, seems to be now.