A fugaz narrativa da ausência. Contos de Luiz Sérgio Metz
The fleeting narrative of absence. Short stories by Luiz Sérgio Metz

Summary/Abstract: Exploring Luiz Sérgio Metz’s fiction reveals a literary landscape where absence becomes a narrative force, shaping stories that evoke the fading world of the gauchesca and the tensions of social transformation. Across his collection O primeiro e o segundo homem, Metz constructs scenes in which what is not said, not seen, or no longer present acquires striking relevance, guiding readers through memory, loss, and disappearing rural traditions. His narrators often highlight negation—not arriving, not acting, not existing—as a stylistic thread that underscores the erosion of cultural practices amid modernization, migration to cities, and the encroachment of monocultures like soy. Through mythical births, duels in darkness, children who imagine birds that exist only in memory, and families leaving the countryside, the stories sketch an archaeology of a vanishing world. Literary references to Veríssimo, Borges, and regional legends enrich this tapestry of erasure, situating Metz within a lineage of authors who fictionalize cultural identity through absence. The collection suggests that the gaucho as a historical figure has long departed, leaving only symbolic traces available to interpretation and reinvention. As rural spaces give way to urban environments and old trades collapse, Metz captures fleeting moments before they dissolve entirely, insisting that the remnants of the past linger in narrative shadows. Ultimately, the work becomes both an elegy and a reconstruction, a poetic attempt to salvage fragments of a cultural universe on the verge of extinction.

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