Gustavo Bernardo Galvão Krause

(* 1955, Rio de Janeiro)

Monte Verità

Krause is a literary scholar and writer, private lecturer (theory of literature) at the University of Rio de Janeiro. He has published a collection of poems and written several novels. His novel Monte Verità, published in 2009, translated from Portuguese.

The Hill of Truth: Monte Verità

"The Hill of Truth" is the most beautiful tale regarding our moral relationship towards the environment and towards each other. But there are no easy answers. What do a hill in Switzerland, a polyglot waiter from Mozambique and a Brazilian professor have in common? How do they call us to respond and act towards a more hopeful future? What can be done, and when should we start?"

Paperback, 2013, 84 pages

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Discomfort and emotion combine in the new novel by writer, literature professor, critic and essayist Gustavo Bernardo. Through fiction, in Monte Verità the author seeks to germinate reflection in young readers, criticising, with fluidity and lightness, in the well-crafted plots of the story, the great ethical shame of man.

In this compelling narrative, an employee at the Swiss hotel Monte Verità is a source of amazement for the guests. He is a curious polyglot waiter who is fluent in Italian, German, French, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, Mandarin and, of course, his mother tongue, Portuguese. With a degree in economics (irrelevant to those he serves), this black man, a fugitive from war, creates, in his hotel room, his story of revenge and redemption – and also the story of revenge and redemption of the world, if you understand his ‘interventions’ that way. These interventions prove to be punches of lucidity in the chest of selfish complacency.

Announced every Sunday, in all possible media, with drastic impositions on humanity, six bombastic messages are an invitation for man to look at our planet, rethink his role in it and his relationship with it. It is an awakening to the future, a new way out of Plato's mythical and allegorical cave.

By criticising ethnocentrism, racism, speciesism, violence and environmental depredation, the philosophical invasion that takes over the terrestrial orb and generates discussion and debate among individuals of all cultures also casts a new and sharp look at our world. Thus, step by step, message by message, Gustavo Bernardo leads his unusual waiter to update – and extend – the imperatives of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant to today's reality. A breath of fresh air for a self-destructive humanity – but only a palliative, if man does not change himself at the root of his being.

Original and surprising, Monte Verità makes you think without feeling, and then feel that you need to think.