The reading of The Letters of the Law, a collection of short stories by various authors organized by Pierre Moreau, shows an impressively positive result.
When a group of legal professionals get together to make literature, we know right away that we are dealing with amateurs, in both senses of the word: they dedicate themselves, out of love, to an activity that they are not professionals in.
Although all of them make their living mainly from what they write, none of them make their living from writing fiction - in fact, they are authors of not only non-fictional pieces, but also pieces marked by functionality: as prosecutors, lawyers or judges, they operate in a milieu where writing has a clear objective: to suggest, avoid or decide on mediation and the intervention of state power in the lives of defendants, clients or parties.
This introduction serves to say that, in similar cases, the desire to make literature doesn't always result in good literature. And in this sense, reading The Letters of the Law, a collection of short stories by various authors organized by Pierre Moreau, has an impressively positive result.
Of course, there are better and worse stories, but the average is very high. And there are no bad stories: the lawsuit that is mixed with an erotic memory in "O ombro de A.", by Eros Grau; Eduardo Muylaert's tour of Paris in "O número 36"; the transience of life and death in "Todas as Manhãs", by José Alexandre Tavares Coelho; the weight of the ruby ring by Miguel Reale Júnior; the violence of the interrogator expressed by Luís Francisco Carvalho Filho; Luciana Gerbovic's autumnal divorce; Luiz Kignel's humor in "Sentence is the law between the parties"; the memory of torture in José Gregori's "Guerino"; the "almost normality" of a judge's life in José Renato Nalini's text; the rivalries of society in Marcelo S. Barbosa's "Firma"; the idea of abandonment. Barbosa; the idea of abandonment in "Flor", by Pierre Moreau; and words twisted by guilt in "Indestino", by Denis Borges Barbosa.
The twelve stories are all interesting individually, but they don't add up to a whole. There are different styles, and as the texts are short, there is a quick transition between them. This makes the short volume easier to read, as the order of the stories doesn't have to be followed. Read at random, the texts are just as interesting when read in sequence.
Professional experience, the day-to-day running of the law, does, of course, leave its mark. They are expressed in a kind of search for meaning in everyday situations, in which the alienation of work seeks answers that bring names and situations closer to real life. In the story of former STF minister Eros Grau, for example, there is a rupture in the supposed impersonality of judgments; in the story of former Justice Minister José Gregori, there is a search for humanity, crowned by a well-known, and therefore not very original, quote about a figure who personifies dehumanization, both because of what he did (torturer) and what he does (butcher).
Two authors I already knew from my professional life as a literary critic and editor: Carvalho Filho, author of the book of short stories Nada mais foi dito nem perguntado (ed. 34), and Luiz Kignel, of the crime novel A morte tudo resolver (Alameda). I expected good things from them. The surprise came from the others.