In the contemporary world, the writer Jefferson Sarmento involves us in a narrative of terror, suspense and mystery in his book “Terra de Almas Perdidas”. Inspired by Brazilian folklore legends, the plot follows the trajectory of Jonas Almozart, who made a pact to keep his lover, Luiza, alive. Now, on the run after committing a crime, he finds refuge in a circus in the mysterious Enseada dos Novenos. There, a series of events leads him to seek out the dreaded bottle cramulão and confront a wicked woman, adored by many citizens. With illustrations that complement the reading, the work addresses contradictions and human desires, questioning greed and selfishness.
Graduated in Publicity and Propaganda, with a postgraduate degree in Creative Writing, Jefferson Sarmento from Rio de Janeiro is the author behind this engaging fantasy narrative, which dialogues with the complexities of human existence. Editor of Tramatura, a publisher focused on fantasy works, the writer has already published several titles, such as “A Casa das 100 Janelas”, “Noites de Tempestade” and “Os Ratos do Quarto ao Lado”. In “Land of Lost Souls”, he takes us through a dark and intriguing universe, full of mysteries and surprises.
What was the inspiration behind the story of “Land of Lost Souls” and how did you develop the plot?
The seed of the story came from the fantasy of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, from 1001 Nights, but when I started thinking about actually writing the story, the idea had already evolved into our folkloric Cramulão da Garrafa. In general, before I sit down to write a story, I need to understand how an initial idea would impact a real person, and here were two questions to start the plot: knowing that he would lose his soul, what would lead a person to wish for the bottle with the devil inside? And how could an object like that, whose existence became almost public among the people of a city, affect everyone, even those who had no idea where it could be? These two questions gave me the character I needed and his journey (who he is and why he would make a pact),
How would you describe the literary genre of this book and how does it differ from your previous works?
Land of Lost Souls is a supernatural thriller with elements of fantastic horror and our folklore — and here is the point that sets this book apart from previous stories. I’ve always enjoyed writing about our daily lives, our values and cultures — which is a way of making the reader look around at certain parts of the book and recognize the setting and concepts of the story as their own. The “Cramulhão da Garrafa” has been part of the popular imagination since colonization, has been marking out the power relations of the coffee barons, was recorded in the works of the folklorist Câmara Cascudo and “participated” in soap operas — in these, most of the time with a tone mockery or farcical distrust. Only here, I left aside that air of ironic lightness to create a story in a much more macabre field.
The main character, Jonas Almozart, makes a pact to keep his lover alive. How does this affect the trajectory of the protagonist throughout the book?
At the beginning of the story we already know that he made the pact. From that point on, we went back a few weeks to answer the question: what would lead a person to sell his soul?
Jonas is a skeptic, an ordinary person who has made a lot of mistakes and bitterly blames himself for them. And then he finds himself entangled by bizarre situations and stories that challenge and undermine his rationality, making him start to believe (unwillingly) in things he previously disdained or simply ignored — like having a soul, for example. But his character arc carries another twist: the possibility of redemption. At first, he accepts his guilt and runs away from a crime he committed because he doesn’t want to pay the penalty for it – but he knows he deserves it and doesn’t question it. He knows and doesn’t hide from the reader that he has serious moral flaws — but next to the people of Enseada dos Novenos he looks like a saint! Um… savior. Someone who will redeem the feathers of everyone who has ever touched or wanted to touch the bottle. What’s more, he would be able to save himself.
The story takes place in a circus in Enseada dos Novenos. How did you choose this setting and how does it contribute to the atmosphere of the book?
I always choose real cities when I start writing, and use that to create a specific place within the book’s fiction. Enseada dos Novenos is partially inspired by the streets of the Historic Center of Paraty, with its colonial buildings, roads designed in curves to facilitate the defense of the city when it was used as a port for the flow of gold that came from Minas. Part of the story of “Terra de Almas Perdidas” is told as a revelation that the bottle has been there, in Enseada, since the time when Don João VI took refuge in Brazil, fleeing from Napoleon, and that sometimes he stayed with the Count that he was would have been the first to own the Cramulão and owned all the land in that region. With this historical background, it made perfect sense to set the events in a place where the architecture and location were like in Paraty. However,
The Rendez-vous Cirque, on the other hand, is a kind of counterpoint to the bizarre nature of the other inhabitants of Enseada. In horror books and movies, circuses are often portrayed as a horror environment, with bizarre characters. The Rendez-vous is the opposite of this: it is a safe haven (or almost) where Jonas manages to take shelter when he arrives in the city. And it is the characters who have lived there for thirty years who will accompany him to the climax of the story — as protectors and protégés, like a family.
The book addresses themes such as desire, greed and human perversity. What message would you like to convey to readers through these themes?
That many times we defend labels of values that, with a look not so deep, reveal themselves to be empty and disconnected from the original value. How to profess a certain faith and act, in everyday life, against everything that religion really represents; how to point out and condemn the crimes and faults of others, and evade your own responsibility.
The question that is evident in the story is: how would a person even consider the possibility of making a pact with the bottle, not only because he knows the penalty he will be sentenced to, but also because what the object represents goes against everything (absolutely everything). ) what the religion professed by people preaches. How can a person get to that point and still defend that he’s doing the right thing?
The not-so-obvious question that I would like to sow in the minds of readers is: what about me? What I myself cry out to defend, but sabotage and justify with petty crumbs every day, every time, as a child, I keep the change for the bread that my parents sent me to fetch at the bakery? Every time a lawyer uses the law to deceive the rite, the agreement, the contract; every time I withhold a tax here, a piece of information there; every time I hide my base vices, even knowing the harm they do to me and the people I love; every time I take advantage of a situation to the detriment of another…“And me?”
The book is divided into parts and includes illustrations of characters and key scenes. How do these visual elements complement the narrative?
The idea of the illustrations is to give faces and environments to the reader. Locate him and illustrate certain expressions, such as “Luiza’s stern look” in the first illustration — a kind of unfathomable expression that reflects the protagonist’s guilt in his narration. But there is a trap here: it is his interpretation that that look is a sign of condemnation. If his thoughts, his state of mind, were different, the interpretation of an impassive face would be different.
This is an allegory for the whole story: the characters’ stories and revelations about everything in the Enseada are their interpretations or extrapolations — if one of them says that something happened like that, there’s no way anyone can be sure that it really was. All the conclusions reached by the protagonist/narrator are his own interpretations of reality (for the image, for the story, for the illustration), not necessarily representing the truth.
How does your background in Publicity and Propaganda influence your writing process and your creative approach?
Objectively speaking: in the best choice of words and structuring them within sentences — as if you were working on an advertising text. It needs to be light and fluid as a text, but without losing the depth of information, the relevance to the story. Of course, there are writers in love with form alone, with the word, with the text. Without discrediting them and the poetics they translate into phrases and verses, I am passionate about history, content, the structure that Aristotle described over 3000 years ago: beginning, middle and end. For the journey that Joseph Campbell described in his Hero’s Journey. Thus, transferring to the literary text the importance and fidelity that an advertising text needs to have with the content it will represent, without losing the magic of the art of telling a good story.
In addition to “Land of Lost Souls”, you have published other horror, suspense and fantasy books. Is there a recurring theme in your works or something that constantly inspires you?
Human strangeness in the face of impossible, fantastic and unusual situations. Writing is a sometimes laborious process, but always fun, and the greatest fun in a horror story is precisely to put characters that would be ordinary real people (you, your neighbor, a co-worker, someone you meet every day when you leave the house at the same time every day, the stranger who drinks coffee at the bakery on the other side of the square where you walk your dog every day) within a world where the rules of reality are not the same as those we know here outside the pages of the book.
What is it like to be an editor at Tramatura and at the same time a published author? How does this experience influence your work as a writer?
The two influence each other directly, and, in fact, Jefferson Sarmento editor was born from Jefferson Sarmento writer. The need to better understand the mechanisms of the publishing market ended up taking me down this path. Understanding the whole process that exists between the awakening of the idea that will generate a new story until the moment when the “end” is typed in the text file is one thing. The journey that this original will go through from that point on is a collective construction (of proofreaders, layout designers, cover designers, graphics, marketing, sales…) that can often leave a writer bored or even with one foot behind certain decisions editorials. But when you are involved in both processes (in the solitary craft of writing and in the exhausting work that is to make an original win bookshelves of readers),
To cite a more practical “interference” of the editor’s work in the writer’s creative process: today, when I am writing a new story, it has become natural to think of key moments in the story that can be used in a marketing campaign, that can help the work of the cover artist or the layout artist to approximate the design in the book to the story…
What can readers expect from your upcoming works and projects?
I really enjoyed visiting national folklore with Cramulhão da Garrafa, but I feel that there is more to this treasure chest. For next year, I am already finalizing a new trip to this world, but this time in not just one entity/creature/being from our folklore, but several. We will have this girl, her name is Mag Ventura, she has a strange gift of photographing people and things that reveal themselves (in her photos) more than they appear to be. And together we will accompany the journey of A Menina que Fotografava Estranhos from Bahia to the heart of Gerais in search of their own origins.
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