Mapping Brazil - Literature: Fiction

Fiction: a different realism
In the last ten years, fiction has continued to grow apace, confirming the direction first taken by the influential authors who came of age in the 1990s, like Milton Hatoum (1952), Rubens Figueiredo (1956), Bernardo Carvalho (1960) and Marçal Aquino (1958).

Differences aside, it would be fair to say that one of the tell-tale features of Brazilian prose today continues to be a taste for realism. In the first decade of the century there was a clear trend towards naturalism, which verged on a kind of showcase for the aberrations and abominations in Brazilian daily life. The outskirts of its big cities became the perfect backdrop for stories that told the experiences of characters on the fringes of society. Some thinkers are still investigating this trend, most notably Ferréz (1975), who writes “from the inside”, meaning from the point of view of dwellers of São Paulo’s peripheral areas, in books like Deus foi almoçar (“God Went Out For Lunch”, 2011) and Os ricos também morrem (“The Rich Die, Too”, 2015).

However, now this trend is being accompanied by more penetrating realism. Literal transposition has given way to more complex, subtle characters and events depicted in the realm of individual or social experiences. Mixing violence with an acerbic tone, Marcelo Mirisola (1966) employs powerful language to foreground his characters’ psychic damage, mirrored in fragmented sentences and narratives. With their scathing, ruthless observations of the middle-class urban lifestyle, his novels – the most recent being Charque (“Jerked Beef”, 2011) and Hosana na sarjeta (“Hosanna in the Gutter”, 2014) – are also marked by wit and autofiction.

Urban peripheries and social dramas are also key elements in Rubens Figueiredo’s (1956) novel, Passageiro do fim do dia (“Last Stop Passenger”, 2010). Without any grand ambitions, the author invites us to take a prosaic bus journey. And so we set off on a kind of humdrum, daily odyssey in which the hero is a young working man on the way to his girlfriend’s house. The commonplace yet farcical events along the way make the journey a metonym for Brazilian life, narrated in a straightforward, sober voice.

Evandro Affonso Ferreira (1945) also invests in works marked by discreet realism. But what makes his novels stand out most is the experimental language he uses, steering clear of standard colloquialism, as in his novels Minha mãe se matou sem dizer adeus (“My Mother Killed Herself Without Saying Goodbye”, 2010), O Mendigo que sabia de cor os adágios de Erasmo de Rotterdam (“The Beggar Who Knew Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Adagias By Heart”, 2012) and Os piores dias da minha vida foram todos (“The Worst Days of My Life Are All of Them”, 2014).

Emotions and personal feelings are the defining features of João Anzanello Carrascoza’s (1962) work, as can be seen from his collections of short stories, Espinhos e Alfinetes (“Thorns and Pins”, 2010), Amores mínimos (“Small Loves”, 2011) and Aquela água toda (“All That Water”, 2012), as well as his novels, Aos 7 e aos 40, (“Aged 7 and Aged 40”, 2013) and Caderno de um ausente (“Notebook by an Absentee”, 2014). They all take a personal point of view, and with an economical style they unfold compelling plots that often draw on childhood memories and family relations.

Lyricism is also one of the keynotes of O último minuto (“The Last Minute”, 2013), a novel by Marcelo Backes (1973). An inmate in his cell tells his life story to a missionary. Reclusion after ten years on the run sets the machinery of memory and reflection in motion. Movement is one of the threads running through the story, which begins in the countryside in southernmost Brazil, and detours through Switzerland and Rio de Janeiro.

Although these writers are from different regions of Brazil, introducing a healthy decentralization to their output, their point of origin in this vast country is not always what determines their texts, which are shaped more by urban experiences, their flows and movements. Indeed, being uprooted is one of the features of contemporary life found in the biographies of most of the authors, who for different reasons have moved around inside Brazil and beyond its shores. The settings are often international and the characters are sometimes foreigners or immigrants.

As always, Chico Buarque de Holanda (1944) leads us down crossed, broken, disconnected, tangled threads. This is also true of his fifth novel, O irmão alemão (“The German Brother”, 2014), a narrative structured around a permanent tension between biographical facts, historical data, hypotheses, free imagination and metalanguage. From the Holocaust to present-day Berlin via the Brazilian military dictatorship, the book is a fine example of autofiction.

Adriana Lisboa (1970) also writes novels marked chiefly by movement and the state of being foreign. Azul corvo (“Raven Blue”, 2010) takes place in Texas, Denver, Rio de Janeiro and Colorado, with characters of different nationalities driven by a mixture of personal and political circumstances. Likewise, Hanói (“Hanoi”, 2013) tells of movement, transience, cultural encounters and miscegenation.

A similar orientation marks the work of two other authors. In her novel Mar Azul (“Blue Sea”, 2012), Paloma Vidal (1975) further investigates themes already explored in her short stories, namely cultural/physical movement, maladaptation and a kind of disillusioned consciousness. Meanwhile, in her short novel Todos nós adorávamos caubóis (“We all Love Cowboys”, 2013), Carol Bensimon depicts characters who seem doomed to be eternal outsiders – cowboys – in space and time, in the city space and in human relations.

Paulo Scott (1966) puts an illegal immigrant in London centre stage in his novel, Habitante irreal (“Unreal Inhabitant”, 2011), to offer an eloquent meditation on the disillusion felt by the generation that lived through the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1980s.

Alongside this cosmopolitanism is a contrasting but not contradictory trend for memorialism, where certain geographical and cultural experiences are given voice, as in the writings of Milton Hatoum (1952) and Antonio Carlos Viana (1946).

Something similar can be perceived in Marcelino Freire (1967), who, after gaining a name for his short stories, has published his first novel, Nossos ossos (“Our Bones”, 2013), narrated by a man who moves from Pernambuco (north-eastern Brazil) to São Paulo. The writing seems to glide between different registers and styles while also playing out the clash between province and metropolis, expressed in terms of contrasting world views and expectations, all melded in the heightened experiences of the great metropolis of São Paulo.

Edyr Augusto Proença (1954), from Pará, northern Brazil, has long written about the rural, regional inheritance. His novel, Selva concreta (“Concrete Jungle”, 2012), while set in Belém, Pará, reflects issues common to any city in Brazil or indeed elsewhere that is attempting to deal with the misery spawned by peripheral capitalism.

Provincial life is also given voice in a simultaneously rural and urban setting in As visitas que hoje estamos (“The Visitors We Are Today”, 2012) by Antonio Geraldo Figueiredo Ferreira (1966). This novel is a great swathe of voices who tell stories unrelated to one another, casting into question the traditional notion of the novel as having a narrative thread. It also melds different genres: short story, poetry, essay and drama. Ultimately, it takes us to a new dimension of what is already called regionalism, here without the slightest intention of propagating a homogeneous reality bound by the rules of a stable narrative.

Investigating similar issues in an original manner, Luiz Ruffato has published Domingos sem Deus (“Sundays Without God”, 2011), the final book from his pentalogy, Inferno provisório (“Provisional Hell”), which began in 2005 with Mamma, son tanto felice. The five novels portray the life of Brazil’s working classes in the last 50 years of the twentieth century through brief narratives. Since his 2011 novel, Ruffato has brought out Flores artificiais (“Artificial Flowers”, 2014), which takes the reader around the world to Beirut, Havana, Hamburg, East Timor, Buenos Aires and beyond in the company of consummate collector of anecdotes.

The best kind of realism is when objectivity and neutrality play second fiddle to subjectivity and even fantasy and absurdity, as is the case of O único final feliz para uma história de amor é um acidente (“The Only Happy Ending for a Love Story is an Accident”, 2010). This novel by João Paulo Cuenca (1978) is set in Tokyo, where two narrators tell two parallel love stories: one is a silicon love doll and the other is a Japanese man who falls for Romanian-Polish woman. The labyrinthine cityscape is mirrored in a fast-paced narrative that gives the reader not a moment of rest.

Another fine example is Joca Reiners Terron’s spiral writing, blending terror, suspense and wit, in A tristeza extraordinária do leopardo-das-neves (“The Extraordinary Sadness of the Snow Leopard”, 2013). In it, a traditional district in São Paulo becomes home to different immigrant groups, where synagogues, Korean sweatshops and thousands of Bolivian workers live cheek by jowl.

The question of deterritorialisation can trigger something more essential than the merely physical: the existential shifting of the subject in the contemporary world. Urban spaces are just the visible manifestation of a disarticulation that affects emotional, cultural and historical ties. The city is far more than mere setting: it materialises experiences; it produces and is produced by the instability of subjects whose existence is affected by a shifting of values that never allows identities to settle or others to be completely recognised. Everything is strange, all meanings are elusive. A sense of incompleteness and melancholy is all-pervasive. A few of the many works that investigate this are: Diário da queda (“Diary of the Fall”, 2011) by Michel Laub (1973), O sonâmbulo amador (“The Amateur Sleepwalker”, 2012) by José Luiz Passos (1971), Barba ensopada de sangue (“Blood-Soaked Beard”, 2012) by Daniel Galera (1979), Pessoas que passam pelos sonhos (“People Who Pass Through Dreams”, 2013) by Cadão Volpato (1956), Opisanie swiata (2013) by Verônica Stigger (1976) and Terra avulsa (“Separate Land”, 2014) by Altair Martins (1975).

As in the best realism, where the writing cannot be reduced to the laws of logic and ideology, the best narrative of a more or less autobiographical turn inevitably incorporates traits of a kind of realism that highlights social criticism, ethical concerns and self-awareness. These traits are evident in the narratives of some established writers and some just starting out. One example of the former case is Silviano Santiago (1936), a skilled craftsman who has always probed the boundaries between genres, tastes, styles, tones and techniques, pushing them back and opening new routes of passage. His 2014 novel, Mil rosas roubadas (“A Thousand Stolen Roses”) is a roman à clef that melds biography and autobiography, fiction and memory, generational experience and personal confession. An example of the latter case is Ricardo Lísias (1975), in whose Divórcio (“Divorce”, 2013) the narrator and character have the same name as the author, blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination in a text riddled with ambiguities, twists and dualities.

In 2012, the Brazilian edition of Granta magazine brought out a special issue on the 20 best young writers in Brazil: Antonio Prata (1977), Antônio Zerxenesky (1984), Carol Bensimon (1982), Carola Saavedra (1973), Chico Mattoso (1978), Cristhiano Aguiar (1981), Daniel Galera (1979), Emilio Fraia (1982), Javier Arancibia Contreras (1976), João Paulo Cuenca (1978), Julián Fuks (1981), Laura Erber (1979), Leandro Sarmatz (1973), Luisa Geisler (1991), Michel Laub (1973), Miguel del Castillo (1987), Ricardo Lísias (1975), Tatiana Salem Levy (1979), Vanessa Barbara (1982) and Vinicius Jatobá (1980). Marking, as it were, the end of a particular aesthetic and ideological cycle, these writers introduce us to characters who are no longer just poor and excluded, but often express a degree of social and cultural refinement with experience acquired in other countries. This is the new blood entering the line-up of Brazilian authors and renewing the range of themes.

It would be fair to say that the quest to find new young authors never ceases, even if this urge is questionable in at least one way: if ever more space is given over to new names and novel experiences, then novelty and the freshness of youth may be exhausted as added values for products – authors/books – and no real commitment to anything more significant and long-lasting will come of it.

To cast a contrasting light on the wonderful wealth of prose in Brazil today, we should not forget two heavyweights who are still producing new works to this day: Dalton Trevisan (1925) and Rubem Fonseca (1925). In 2015, both authors turned 90. Trevisan, a master short story writer, recently brought out Desgracida (“Disgraced”, 2010), O anão e a ninfeta (“The Dwarf and the Nymphette”, 2011) and Beijo na nuca (“Kiss on the Neck”, 2014), while Fonseca published a new novel, José, in 2011, and three volumes of short stories: Axilas e outras histórias indecorosas (“Armpits and Other Indecorous Stories”, 2011), Amálgama (“Amalgam”, 2013) and Histórias curtas (“Short Stories”, 2015).

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