The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Brazil

With a population as great as that of all the other South American nations combined and with the next largest, Argentina, having barely more than a fifth as many people, Brazil is the colossus of the continent; it also dwarfs Portugal, whose colony it once was. Despite sharing an Iberian heritage with many of its neighboring countries, Brazil’s official language is Portuguese, not Spanish. Demographically, Brazil was shaped by its legacy of historically being the largest importer of slaves in the Western Hemisphere. All these factors have helped develop a strong and self-sufficient literary culture and market.

The Brazilian literary tradition goes back well into the nineteenth century and, in Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), boasts one of the great novelists of that time in any language. Machado was a successful author during his own lifetime and seems destined to remain popular. His The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881, English 1997; previously published in English as Epitaph of a Small Winner, 1952, and Posthumous Reminiscences of Braz Cubas, 1955) and Quincas Borba (1891, English 1998; previously published in English as Philosopher or Dog? 1954) are still fresh and modern in their use of realism and stylistic conceits.

Jorge Amado (1912–2001) was the first Brazilian author to achieve great international success, and his colorful and often rollicking novels of the Bahia region enjoy worldwide popularity. A Communist who briefly served in the Brazilian congress and who won a Stalin Peace Prize in 1951, his work was always socially engaged, but he is best known for the more comic works he wrote after he left active politics, beginning with the entertaining Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1958, English 1962). Sex and sensuality are prominent in these later novels, with several, such as Tereza Batista (1972, English 1975), featuring protagonists who are prostitutes. His female characters tend to be strong individuals, overcoming the exploitation they are subjected to, though Amado empowers them only to a limited extent and prefers that they ultimately assume more conventional and traditional roles. As suggested in the complete title, which is close to the Portuguese original, of Tieta, the Goat Girl; or, The Return of the Prodigal Daughter: Melodramatic Serial Novel in Five Sensational Episodes, with a Touching Epilogue, Thrills, and Suspense! (1977, English 1979), Amado’s novels are not understated. Many describe improbable adventures, and some move into the magical and fantastical. For example, one of the husbands is even dead and yet still a posthumous presence in Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966, English 1969), one of Amado’s best books. Not surprisingly, with so many novels, basic themes and tropes are repeated, and even their exuberance can be exhausting, but for the most part his works are both winning entertainment and memorable portraits of all classes of people, as well as of the Bahia region.

The existential works of Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), with their strong feminine perspective and voice, contrast with much of the South American fiction of her time. Many, like The Stream of Life (1973, English 1989, and as Água Viva 2012) and the disturbing, self-abasing The Passion According to G. H. (1964, English 1988, 2012), are introspective first-person narratives. One of her last books, The Hour of the Star (1977, English 1986, 2011), a novella about the sorry life (and tragic death) of a typist with small delusions of grandeur, is a sort of summation of Lispector’s work and a good starting point. Narrated by a man named Rodrigo S. M., it is his account of trying to record and understand the brief existence of Macabéa, an ugly girl living in humble circumstances who loses her boyfriend and then her life. As in many of Lispector’s novels, the plot is minimal, and instead, The Hour of the Star is a work of reflection on life and writing.

A STORYTELLING MASTERPIECE

João Guimarães Rosa’s (1908–1967) Grande sertão: Veredas (1956) was translated into English as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1963), but that rendering has long been out of print and is widely considered inadequate. Prospects for a new translation have repeatedly been dashed, but one will eventually appear. In this seminal work of Brazilian literature, a narrative and linguistic tour de force (hence also the difficulties in translating it), a man recounts his life story, looking for absolution and trying to make sense of what he has lived through and done.

Osman Lins’s (1924–1978) later novels are interesting experiments with form. The labyrinthine The Queen of the Prisons of Greece (1976, English 1995) is the diary of a teacher who, in writing about the unpublished work left by his dead lover, probes his relationship with her as well as the nature of creativity and fiction. The complex structure of Avalovara (1973, English 1980) is considerably more challenging, its multiple narratives built up around a palindrome in a novel revolving around the protagonist’s pursuit of three different women.

Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s (b. 1936) novels also are far from straightforward, with Zero (English 1983) assembled from short sections and fragments and written in a variety of styles. It is a powerful and absurdist indictment of the conditions under military rule in the Brazil of those years. (Unable to find a publisher for the novel in Brazil, Zero first appeared in an Italian translation, by Antonio Tabucchi, in 1974.) Brandão’s rather cinematic Teeth Under the Sun (1976, English 2007) features a protagonist who finds himself increasingly isolated in a town that many have already abandoned. The atmosphere in the novel reflects the repression of the times. Brandão’s particularly dark dystopian vision of São Paulo and environmental catastrophe in the futuristic novel And Still the Earth (1982, English 1985) still holds up well despite its bleakness.

João Ubaldo Ribeiro (1941–2014) made an early impression on English-speaking audiences with his own translation of his novel about an out-of-control mercenary, Sergeant Getúlio (1971, English 1978). The Lizard’s Smile (1989, English 1994), set on a secluded island, centers on a husband and wife and the strains of their marriage, but it also contains political intrigue and elements of a thriller. Ribeiro cannot quite pull it off cleanly, but comparisons to Graham Greene’s books are not unreasonable. The large-scale family epic An Invincible Memory (1984, English 1989) chronicles how Brazil was shaped over the past four centuries, and its entertaining presentation of history and changing national identity makes it the most readily rewarding of his novels.

Much of Moacyr Scliar’s (1937–2011) fiction deals with Jewish and emigrant themes, most successfully in his novel of assimilation, The Centaur in the Garden (1980, English 1985), with its half-human, half-centaur protagonist who must constantly deal with his otherness. Guedali Tartakovsky tells the story of his life inhabiting this hybrid body, from a relatively carefree childhood to a much more difficult adolescence. After spending time as a circus act, Guedali and the female centaur he meets undergo an operation that makes them much more human. Left with centaur legs and hooves but otherwise entirely human bodies, their true identities can be masked and hidden from others but never entirely forgotten. While they continue their transformation into full-fledged human form, Guedali is never entirely certain that he is doing the right thing by not being true to himself (or at least his original form).

Scliar’s Kafka’s Leopards (2000, English 2011) is a tale of misinterpretations, beginning with a young would-be Trotskyist named Mousy making contact with the wrong writer in 1916 Prague and receiving a parable from Franz Kafka instead of the secret missive he had been charged to obtain. The signed text does not yield the secrets that Mousy had been told to expect but nonetheless is still valuable, and Mousy carries it with him for the next decades. Half a century later, in the mid-1960s, Mousy wants to sell it and use the proceeds to help his grand-nephew escape the brutal crackdown in Brazil, but his intentions are again thwarted by a misinterpretation of the text. A novella that covers just three periods in Mousy’s life, this is a charming and amusing work.

Interest in Scliar’s Max and the Cats (1981, English 1990) revived after Yann Martel’s 2002 Man Booker Prize–winning Life of Pi (2001) was discovered to be similar to it. Although the very compact three-part novella is of some interest, Scliar’s novel about a man discovering his Jewish roots, The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes (1983, English 1988), and also The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar (English 1999) offer more rewards.

Luís Fernando Veríssimo’s (b. 1936) The Club of Angels (1998, English 2001) is an amusing novel about a group of friends who meet monthly for a grand dinner, which takes on a whole new meaning when members of this select club begin dying, one after every meal. It is a clever mystery, but Veríssimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans (2000, English 2005) is much more impressive. A well-crafted homage to Borges and Poe, its construction may be too obviously thought through, as the significance of many of the details becomes clear only retrospectively. The narrator, Vogelstein, attends a conference of Poe enthusiasts and scholars at which there is a murder of the classic locked-room variety. Borges also plays a prominent role in the story and is the author who brings the book to its conclusion.