Mathematics describes that a common minimum multiple is the smallest positive multiple value between two or more numbers. The author gaucho, João Gilberto Noll, proposes a new formulation for this concept. In his book Mínimos, Múltiplos, Comuns, Noll delineates, above all by his incredible capacity for synthesis, how instants and characters are multiplied, divided and exponentially summed up in a unique work.
Mínimos, Múltiplos, Comuns, published in 2003 and reprinted by Editora Record last year, is a collection of approximately 340 short novels, each with about 130 words, published in the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper between 1998 and 2001. The micro-stories narrated by Noll during the times the author was a columnist, are reorganized in the book, in order to allow a chain of ideas and situations, in which the whole is as important as the chapters that compose it.
By adopting chronology similar to the Bible, which goes from Genesis to Return, the basis of the book is organization. The least, every little romance, is gradually being added to another. The reader transits from the sepulchral nothingness before creation to the noise of the verb issued by those who will inhabit this physical creation. The minimum subsists in the elements that will surround these inhabitants, the social and personal dynamics. The minimum is still encompassed by concrete, in what they have of more tangible, as the labels of family, man, woman and child, to what there is ambiguous as the very existence.
Noll’s minima are the instants of each scene portrayed. As the reader reads one, he feels incomplete, as if the broken stories were insufficient alone. In the chapter Reflexes, for example, the reader finds himself facing a man who decides to fall in love in the morning, a child carrying a handkerchief and a wound. The character is portrayed as someone looking for something indeterminate. There are three stories that reflect each other. Three stories about what it is like to find yourself before your own reflection. Almost as a meta-reflection of the very chapter in which they are inserted, and a metareflection of the text of Noll. This multiplication of the stories shows a density greater than the time line that the author tries to construct, developing a parallel between each limit situation.
The common are an allusion to the process of creation and return and the elements that will make up this physical and spectral universe. Some novels are simple and easy to interpret, such as “The Bread,” a reference to social status that affects the relationship of a father and daughter. Other tales are blurred and distant, possibly as they were even felt. Others literally complete each other, such as the insulin crisis of a diabetic character and Ruço, the outlaw, known to walk “night and day through the scenes of tensions.”
In the microstory “Story in the Bathroom”, the reader is faced with the narrator’s impasse in removing his beard for years. The routine, the shaving in front of the mirror, gains universality in the sudden trip by the appreciation of the dirty clothes of the basket. Looking at oneself in the mirror, when the protagonist’s goal is to fall in love, transcends the routine action: beard for years and the dirty clothes of the basket are questions resigned with the passing of hours of reflection. If the narrator fears or has another feeling when spending hours in the bathroom, the one who has the memories awakened is the reader in his full identification, because the tale, like so many others in the book, lapid what is banal.
This reflective aspect of the work recommends a calm and slow reading between chapters, averse to the speed and gluttony with which a Twitter user is accustomed. There is a limit of words / characters to establish communication in these logics of capturing the instant with accurate, well placed words. They are narratives in the 130 words of Noll’s minimal text, while each published text of the social network does not exceed 140 characters. Logics that are conversed as reflections, exactly opposite: in the need to contemplate the small moments, reading the book requires the individually expensive work of transposing the minimum to the maximum, while on Twitter the minimum is minimized. The limit allows the work to interpret the situations narrated within a global panorama: to see which mirror of the soul of those who read reflects aspects of the image constructed in the story. The limit determines Twitter as a documentary tool of the moments, to be read in a moment, a reading of eyes run by a computer screen or cellular device.
Mínimos, Múltiplos, Comuns requires your reader a patience like that of Odysseus on his ten year journey until he returns to Ithaca, where all obstacles and details are complete only when interwoven together. The work rescues in the reader the memories of the moments that put marks in the mirror; Moments that justify smiling faces, wrinkles on the forehead, freckles of the sun or pallor of reclusive days.