Pedro Bandeira: O Melhor Presente

 I expected this to be a light and fluffy children's book, and to have little to say about it other than congratulating myself on finishing a book in Portuguese.  I should have known, based on the author's reputation and the depth of the fellow who recommended him to me, that there would be more.  A typical children's book, in the Western canon at least, would have ended the story with a satisfactory conclusion that left all the characters feeling good and having learned an important lesson.  Usually the characters and situations are simply tools in the author's box, and are put neatly back after having had their adventure.  

 Bandeira, however, seems to care little about the characters.  They are fictional, and their growth is meaningless.  He takes aim directly at the reader, and delivers lesson to them so stern and bleak that one wonders if he meant for children to read this book at all.  Children are, after all, only marginally capable of internalizing and making meaningful changes in the way they consume.  Adults, however, can easily imagine the possibility of Earth becoming a garbage dump filled with trash, and could even  take steps to prevent it.

The Zend Avesta

My father's family is fucked up in a very American way.  His father was emotionally distant and oblivious, and naturally adhered closely to the expectations of a society that was designed to favor him.  His wife, obsessed with others' perception of her and her family, devoted herself to the keeping up and putting in of appearances, which allowed no room to think about or heal the cruelty she endured at his hands.  Naturally, she became a huge bitch, which had the expected effects on the next generation.  Less information is available about the ways they were treated by their parents, although everything that is told lines up nicely with the throughline of American Trauma that one sees in movies and television.  Very sad, but not very unusual.

My mother's family, however, is a whole new, twisted kind of fucked up.  It really should be turned into a book.  The strange thing is that everyone is a victim in it.  Even the abusers and assholes are/were just displaying very understandable reactions to their horrible traumae.  It's a Rube Goldberg device of emotional suffering that one can follow from what I hope will be it's final victim, me, back up through the strings and pulleys to the man that seems to have pulled the first lever:  my great grandfather, who bears all the hallmarks of a hedonistic sociopath.  Tracing the trauma back upstream has helped me quite a bit in the process of healing my own programming, forgiving those who programmed me,and making sure it stops with me.

Which is all to the point of saying that I think I have also found the source of Western Civilization's trauma.  I originally thought that I was going to find something deep and profound in this book, the progenitor of all Judeo-Islamic-Christian belief systems.  At the least, I hoped to find meaningful, or at least interesting, stories, symbols, and characters.  Instead, I found a truly ghoulish mishmash of impossible and burdensome procedures and proscriptions.  If this is our great grandfather, it's no wonder that our family is this fucked up.