At dawn, the departure: The complexity of exile in “Far away from Marienbad”, by Caio Fernando Abreu

Abstract

The theme of the foreign condition runs through the four texts collected in Estranhos estrangeiros, by Caio Fernando Abreu. Among them, the short story "Bem longe de Marienbad" will be recovered from the construction of the character-narrator whose interaction with the absence/presence of another character, K, operates as the engine of a love search, in principle unsuccessful, that can also be read as a kind of extraction of one's own roots, of the adoption of exile as a voluntary permanent state. The perspective of exile is thus interwoven throughout the narrative and will be taken from a suggestive synonymy with the difficulty of reading the traces of the provocative presence of the beloved one. On the other hand, the narrative also allows us to take the condition of exile not only in its negative and oppressive dimension, but also highlights the space of freedom that it holds. The crossing of the narrative, therefore, will allow us to take exile both as a subtraction of the possibilities of reading the world by those who find themselves in a condition of exile and as a space of freedom to allows one to build his own experience.