A (in)felicidade de Sara Lisa by Ana Portocarrero

Sara Lisa starts of the book with such an honest vision of what for her is good writing that the whole reading of the book made me question what I considered good writing. I read in two, three languages (portuguese, english and sometimes spanish) and every time I get a sense that it really depends on how the writing takes me along the journey. I have read some books with very complicated writing, at least for me but I could tell that the plot was a beautiful story of grief and companionship. However this book was so simple in it’s writing that I felt like I was talking to a friend.

She discusses with the reader that she wants to be a great writer, one of the greatest but so far what she has a comparison are the artists and authors who are unhappy. Not miserable because of money, love, drinking, drugs or any outside world effect, but they are truly unhappy people.

Destiny heard her and delivered to her someone who had everything to be the unhappiest person but always carried a smile on him, Gael is a mysterious man that helps Sara find true unhappiness, but to his own surprise, she feels sadness, anger and many other negative emotions but never unhappiness.

The ways in which Gael helped Sara find unhappiness were out of the ordinary however the surprising bit for me was always the sense of security in which these experiments happened. Yes, they were difficult to understand because the sudden change provoked such a strong sense of whiplash but at the same time, at no point in the book did I feel like Sara was ever in true danger.

I loved the way she understood human nature and how human doesn’t mean humane or sensible. She saw reality but yet she never let what she was going through corrupt her own view of herself. She reviewed her emotions often and most of the time she was honest and said “I am not unhappy”. She was grateful for all she got to experience and have up to that point and it opened my eyes to see my surroundings and what I have in a brighter light.

The end of the book I won’t spoil it because it was one of the hardest ones for me and damn it nearly broke me to the core. It opened my view of how the world can be a place of wonder or ugliness, depending on which way you want to look at it.