Paula Mota’s Reviews > Uma Mulher Desnecessária > Status Update

Paula Mota
is on page 114 of 264
It's not as if you're born with the ability to love António Lobo Antunes.
[Até um libanês sabe isso! :-) ]
I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul. Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain? (...) What good is a personal skylight if I«m the only one who see its light? How special!
[5*, sem dúvida!]
— Jun 12, 2025 05:18AM
[Até um libanês sabe isso! :-) ]
I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul. Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain? (...) What good is a personal skylight if I«m the only one who see its light? How special!
[5*, sem dúvida!]
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Paula’s Previous Updates

Paula Mota
is 95% done
I am nothing
I'll always be nothing (...)
Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa's bissexual dandy poet, wrote that. He is welcome in my home anytime. I am nothing. I should aspire to become a speck.
(...) Forget the industrialized countries; I can work with writers from the third world, Ireland! Edna O'Brien, Colm Tóibín, or Anne Enright. [:D]
— Jun 15, 2025 11:08AM
I'll always be nothing (...)
Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa's bissexual dandy poet, wrote that. He is welcome in my home anytime. I am nothing. I should aspire to become a speck.
(...) Forget the industrialized countries; I can work with writers from the third world, Ireland! Edna O'Brien, Colm Tóibín, or Anne Enright. [:D]

Paula Mota
is on page 217 of 264
There must be a word in some language that describes the anguish you experience upon suddenly coming face-to-face with your terrifying future. I can't think of one in any of the languages I know. Maybe it exists in Swahili or Sanskrit. Maybe I can make one up, like Hamsun's Kuboaa. Maybe the word is just mother
— Jun 14, 2025 01:42PM

Paula Mota
is on page 165 of 264
Like Ricardo Reis, aka Fernando Pessoa, I am a pantheist. I follow the lesser gospel, now deemed apocryphal. I worship - well, I worshipped, past tense, for this morning I don't have the stomach to believe in anything - at the shrines of my writers. I am in large measure a Pessoan.
— Jun 13, 2025 04:32AM

Paula Mota
is on page 95 of 264
These literary dilettantes know books about as well as an airline passenger knows the landscape he overflies; they talk about novels in highlights as if they're reading a fashion magazine. I ordered books and if no one bought them, I carried them home. (...) I like to consider my little thefts a public service. (...) For crying out loud, do you think anyone else in Lebanon has a copy of Djuna Barnes's "Nightwood"?
— Jun 11, 2025 11:44AM

Paula Mota
is on page 63 of 264
Crates, crates, boxes and crates. The translated manuscripts have the two books, French and English, affixed to the side of the box for identification. Tolstoy, Gogol and Hamsun; Calvino, Borges, Schulz, Nádas, Noteboom; Kis, Karasu and Kafka; books of memory, disquiet, but not of laughter and forgetting. Years of books, books of years. A waste of time, a waste of a life.
— Jun 07, 2025 03:35AM

Paula Mota
is on page 59 of 264
I am growing senile. Forgeting an Ophelia? The liasion's brevity was due to the malicious interference of none other than Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa's on creation, one of the 72 literary identities he used, the bissexual dandy who loathed Ophelia. (...)
I thought I'd be reading a new book today, but it doesn't feel right, or I don't feel like it. Some days are not new-book days.
— Jun 06, 2025 07:15AM
I thought I'd be reading a new book today, but it doesn't feel right, or I don't feel like it. Some days are not new-book days.

Paula Mota
is on page 2 of 264
Funny. My bathroom tiles are rectangular white with interlocking light blue tulips, almost the same shade as my new dye. Luckily, the blue isn't that of the Israeli flag. Can you imagine? Talk about a brawl of mismatched contestants.
— Jun 06, 2025 05:36AM