Post by @federicabalbi

What happens in-between events? What happens in the time we spend waiting? A machine like a video game, and reality like the game’s plot. 

Waiting time is what fills our lives and opens up space for the unattended. In the Sixties, a secret group of researchers developed Wasteband, a machine to manipulate waiting time, enriching it through memory transfer. Meanwhile, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. 

In the Nineties, the experiment was secretly brought further and developed. Tânia and João are waiting for each other, and Krikalev is waiting in his orbiting satellite. 

Patrícia Portela created a highly metaliterary universe, where fiction is reality and reality is fiction. She plays with the text as a device, underlining its conventional and sometimes contradictory nature. She throws her characters into chaos, and lets them wait.

This absurdist book is a beautiful and interesting experiment that dismisses all rules, those of time and space as well as those of logic, in favour of a scattered narrative that deletes actions (the only possible action is the reader’s act of reading) and focuses on the ‘empty’ moments, turning them into a philosophy and an aesthetic. The reader is directly addressed but hasn’t got any agency: they can only decide to play or to drop out of the game. In fact, this unconventional novel necessarily acquires the shape of an adventure in the Wasteband.

When space and time collapse, and reality is ruled by machines, what is the part of humans, beyond waiting?

Published by: Editorial Caminho, 2014

Original language: Portuguese