Padrão de Resposta

So it happened that in this panel five individuals desolated by the 10th of November coup, devoid of any propensity to praising, weary, decided to read more than fifty volumes. You can imagine how the task is carried out. We peruse the thing, bored, making faces, admitting at last that reading is unnecessary; we drop it, take a piece of paper, scribble a zero, sometimes any kind of strong-worded comment. And move on. Something that seems reasonable is left aside to be examined later.
Worsening my mood in this way, I opened a big heavy block with five hundred large pages: a dozen lengthy tales, signed by a certain Viator. In such cases, we beg God that the original be not worth a dime and spare us from the obligation of going to the end. It didn't turn out that way: that was too serious a work. The author was certainly a "mineiro” doctor and the book resembled his origins: a landscape of mountains, it would climb a lot and then come down – and the peaks were magnificent, while the valleys disappointed me.
On the day of the judgement, we spent hours hesitating between this uneven volume and another: “Maria Perigosa”, that neither rose nor fell much. I chose the second one.
Viator disappeared without leaving a trace. That upset me: I sincerely wished to see him grow, maybe to convince myself of my mistake in not choosing him.
At the end of 1944, Ildefonso Falcão introduced me to J. Guimarães Rosa, an embassy secretary who had just arrived from Europe.
“You took part in a panel that judged a book of mine in 1938.”
“What was your alias?”
“Viator.”
“Do you know that I voted against your book?”
“Yes, I do,” he replied without any sign of resentment.