‘Inexplicable Tree’ merges what we insist on separating – 07/22/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

I’m willing to bet that no one in the upper echelons of the serious Fapesp (São Paulo State Research Support Foundation) imagined that one day the main funding agency for science in São Paulo would be mentioned in a fantasy novel. By the way, it is a narrative in which terms like “neotropical primates” (that is, New World monkeys, like the many that still resist in the forests of Brazil) are almost as ubiquitous as occurrences that we would describe as magical. And, of course, the epicenter of these facts are very special trees.

I’m talking about “Árvore Inexplicable”, a book by Brazilian writer Carol Chiovatto that has stolen a few hours of sleep from me over the last few weeks, in my impatience to reach the end of its three hundred and so many pages. I must say it was worth it: the story, in addition to being electrifying, has an immense heart. Furthermore, it merges worlds with rare harmony that, to the impoverishment of all of us, we sometimes insist on keeping apart.

Since I still have some love for my skin, I won’t irritate future readers of the novel with “spoilers”. Suffice it to say that the story begins with the strange luminous phenomena observed by the protagonist, the university student Diana, in the cobwebs that hang from certain trees. The mystery thickens with the appearance of abaobis, a species still unknown to science of (yes, you guessed it) neotropical primates, and with the revelation that there are people economically interested in arboreal occurrences.

The backdrop for these upheavals is the first stage of the Covid-19 pandemic and the anti-scientific stupidity of the Bolsonaro government, both duly portrayed with the claustrophobia that gripped Brazil and the world in 2020. By email, Chiovatto told me that Bolsonarism’s neglect and mockery of science were the main motivations for approaching the work. But there are also deeper ones.

“I have a bit of a tantrum with these great literary oppositions: magic and science, nature and culture”, explains the author. “This directs our daily thinking a lot, it makes it seem that there is a confrontation, that it is kill or be killed, as if we humans were not part of a great ecosystem. We see ourselves separated from the world.”

“At the same time, fantastic literature is usually seen only as escapist. Although I do not deny the value of escapism (everyone has the right to want to escape from the world from time to time), I think it is a very simplistic view. Fantastic literature has the potential to highlight subjects that are very close to us, perhaps too close and, therefore, painful. I wanted to put science there, not as an opposite, but as a complement”, she summarizes.

As I read these responses, I couldn’t help but remember what a giant of last century fantasy literature said about “escapism” in an essay called “On Fairy Stories.”

“Why should a man be mocked if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?”, writes the philologist JRR Tolkien, author of “The Lord of the Rings”. “The idea that motor cars are more ‘alive’ than, say, centaurs or dragons is a curious one; that they are more real than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how impressively alive is a factory chimney compared to a tree: poor obsolete thing, an escapist’s insubstantial dream!”

Chiovatto’s book shows that science and fantasy can be twin tools, acts of imagination and understanding that reveal the enormity of the world around us, the smallness and greatness of belonging to a single Tree of Life.

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