A given essay might invoke a passage from Ecclesiastes, a childhood memory, a theory of psychoanalysis, and something about a tree, with a verse from Vinicius de Moraes thrown in for perspective.

His topics touch on sex, death, gardening, politics, God, gods, violins, old age, youth, stupidity, art, popcorn, record players, ipê trees, Nietzsche – a breadth and variety beyond the scope of any other writer.

Like much in Brazil, Rubem Alves is an almost complete secret from the rest of the world. His more than 40 books have been translated into several languages, yet few in Europe and North America have ever heard his name.

In a cutting-edge initiative, publisher New London Librarium is trying to change that. It has just launched The Best Chronicles of Rubem Alves, a translation of short essays, and it will soon publish a translation of Retorno e Terno.

Just look at some of the topics in Best Chronicles: How Goodness Happens, On Politics and Gardening, When Pain Turns into Poetry, In Praise of Uselessness, Friendly Loneliness, It’s in Talking that We Misunderstand.

His imagination staggers the mind of the reader. His unexpected perspectives and metaphors make the mind spin. When he writes about popcorn, he isn’t writing about popcorn. He’s writing about the essence of human existence.

When he compares tennis and matkot (a non-competitive beach paddleball game), he is really writing about one of the fundamental flaws – and hopes – of mankind, the need to defeat versus the will to cooperate.

Here’s the first paragraph in Best Chronicles:

“For the past two weeks I’ve been starting my days by committing theft. I don’t know how to avoid this sin, and, to tell the truth, I don’t want to avoid it. The guilt is from a mulberry tree. Disobeying the commandment of the wall that fences it in, it thrusts its branches over the sidewalk.

“Not satisfied, it loads them with fat, black, appetizing, tempting mulberries [in Portuguese, amoras] within reach of my hand. It seems that the fruits are, by vocation, invitations to theft: changing the order of a single letter is enough.

“I think that the case of the mulberry tree proves this linguistic thesis: Everything depends on a name. Because amora is a word which, if repeated several times, amoramoramoramora turns into amor – love.

“And isn’t that what love is? – a desire to eat, a desire to be eaten. The wall, much like a commandment, says it is prohibited. But love is not contained. Cross-dressed as a mulberry, it jumps the fence. Thus it was in Paradise…”

There’s plenty to think about there, and he’s just getting started. In that same chronicle, he goes on to talk about housewives blind to the beauty of blossoms they sweep from the sidewalk, about trees groaning with sexual pain and pleasure as their branches rub, about nature as a psychoanalyst…
Alves was born in the little town of Boa Esperança, Minas Gerais. Destined for a wider world, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He also trained as a psychoanalyst, and he taught at the State University of Campinas, in São Paulo state.

He wrote extensively on education and religion. He was also an early thinker on Liberation Theology, which put him a odds with Brazil’s military government in the 1960s and ’70s.

New London Librarium, a small press in Connecticut, is quickly expanding a series of books on Brazilian culture, history, literature, and issues. The series includes translations of Machado de Assis and literary journalist João do Rio.

Glenn Alan Cheney, the translator of the Rubem Alves books, has also contributed books on the Quilombo dos Palmares, the Estrada Real, a nun in Mato Grosso, and issues in Amazônia. Several of the books are bilingual, with Portuguese and English on facing pages.

Alves died in 2014. His daughter, Raquel Alves, now director of the Instituto Rubem Alves, wrote the Foreword to Best Chronicles. She wrote:

“Rubem Alves had an astonishing outlook on life. Its mysteries and beauties, which appeared day after day, from the magnificent sunsets to the minute details drawn on the wings of butterflies, did not pass unnoticed before his eyes. It was always magic, and the world was a source of mysteries that, if viewed with sensibility, awaken within us the pleasure of life.”

And she should know. He raised her, and she says that with her birth, he took a new perspective on life. And at that same moment, so did she.

For more information on these books, see http://www.NLLibrarium.com

Also a journalist and a political scientist, he penned over 20 books, published in 16 countries. He is also a writer of short-stories, crônicas, and essays.

Among his main works are Sergeant Getúlio (1971), translated into 12 languages, An Invincible Memory (1989) and The Lizard’s Smile (1989).

In 2008, João Ubaldo Ribeiro won the Camões Award, granted by the Portuguese and Brazilian governments to authors who contribute to the richness of the Portuguese language. Sergeant Getúlio and An Invincible Memory earned him the Jabuti Award, from the Brazilian Book Chamber, one of the Brazil’s most prestigious prizes.

The scholar and philologist Evanildo Bechara commented the death of his friend and colleague at the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Bechara said that the ABL was still recovering from the death of academician Ivan Junqueira when it received the sad news of the death of João Ubaldo Ribeiro.

“The ABL, which seeks to be a place for the major exponents of the Brazilian literature, just had a rude blow with the death of João Ubaldo. He was perhaps our greatest expression in prose. He was a man with books that will stay for a long time as representatives of the modern Brazilian literature. He was an educated man, not only a great prose writer, but also a great chronicler and connoisseur of everything. He was a man with a great general culture, which he sprinkled in his articles. He represented Brazil very well, both inside and outside its borders.”

Ubaldo Ribeiro was born in Bahia, but his family moved to Aracaju (Sergipe state), when he was two months old. His father, Manuel Ribeiro, lawyer of renown in the Bahian capital, and also a professor, hired a teacher to give private lessons to his little boy.

He started in journalism in 1957, working as a reporter at Jornal da Bahia. Later he moved to the Tribuna da Bahia, where he would become the editor-in-chief. Along with legendary filmmaker Gláuber Rocha, he edited magazines, newspapers and participated in the student movement at the end of the 1950s.

In 1964, João Ubaldo went to the United States, thanks to a scholarship from the American Embassy to get a masters degree in political science at the University of Southern California.

João Ubaldo Ribeiro was very active till the end of his life, collaborating regularly in O Globo e O Estado de S. Paulo newspapers. He was also a contributor to publications in Germany and Portugal.

ABr

Machado de Assis, as he came to identify himself, was born on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro in 1839. His father, a son of former slaves, was a house painter of African and European race, his mother a Portuguese washerwoman from the Azores. Young Joaquim attended public school but did not do well.

His mother died when he was ten. His father later married a woman of his own racial background, a candy-maker at a girls school. There the boy received what could be called informal education – lessons overheard from other rooms.

But a priest  with whom he served mass taught him Latin, and then a local baker, an immigrant, taught him French. As a polyglot adolescent, he was later able to teach himself English and German. Words became important to him. He befriended a man who owned a bookstore, newspaper, and printing business who would publish one of the fifteen-year-old’s poems in his newspaper.

A year later the young man landed an apprenticeship as a typesetter at the government’s official publication agency. From the fringes of the publishing industry, writing was a natural next step, one he took with the motley baggage of personal tragedy, Catholicism, language, government bureaucracy, and all his eager eyes had observed around him.

He found himself on a lot of fringes. He was born a year before Dom Pedro II became the second and last emperor of Brazil. Brazil itself seemed on the fringe of western civilization, on the wrong side of the equator, with a language not widely spoken in the rest of the world. Its society went through considerable transition during his lifetime, moving from monarchy to republic, from slave-holding to free, from agrarian to industrial, from horse and carriage to leadership in aviation.

One of the most significant transitions – one still underway – became the underlying tension of Assis’s fiction: the shift from the hierarchical strictures of Portuguese tradition to a society liberating itself into modernity and its own cultural identity.

In almost every story he wrote, people are clinging to the cultural anchor from which their human nature is trying to free itself. Tradition and ancient values pull them one way while passion and independence pull them another. It was a cultural feijoada that encompassed the cangaceiro as much as the carioca.

It is said that Machado de Assis never traveled more than a day from where he was born. His world was Rio, but it was a world complete with all the social squirmings, the political conflicts, the clashing of values, the tides of history, people’s efforts to rise above themselves and the muck they held so dearly.

Who better to observe and interpret this upheaval than a man born at the bottom and working his way into the muddle of the middle class? A liberal who adhered to the old monarchy, Machado de Assis questioned the ability of the hoi polloi to organize their own lives, let alone their own government.

His characters were anti-heroes creating their own problems, people steeped in gossip, their petty pursuits befuddled by their own flaws – vanity, jealousy, hypocrisy, passion, pride, greed, envy, shame, fear, anxiety, and others we have yet to define. Twenty-five years before Freud’s pronouncements, he depicted the rumble of ego, superego, and the underlying id, forces he found parallel in personalities, society, and politics.

He was more than a prefrontal Freud. Literary critics have compared him to Chekhov, Dickens, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Barthelme, Beckett, Gogol, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne.

Phillip Roth compared him to Beckett. Allen Ginsburg compared him to Kafka. Susan Sontag, John Barth, Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes, and José Saramago expressed their admiration. Harold Bloom called him “a kind of miracle, another demonstration of the autonomy of literary genius in regard to time and place, politics and religion.”

Woody Allen ranked the novel Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas as one of the five most influential books he’d ever read. Once one considers that, every time the narrator of an Assis story suddenly addresses the reader, one can see Woody Allen, as actor, turning to the camera to tell the audience what’s really going on.

Critics have labeled Machado de Assis a realist for his descriptions of life as it is and for his rejection of standard (i.e. formerly realistic) concepts of beauty and propriety. They have also labeled him an anti-realist for his stories’ hallucinant appearances of insects expressing opinions, gods wrestling with their own myths, a king and queen exchanging souls, the icons of saints discussing their loss of belief in men, and Alcibiades returning to Earth to tell a historian that Athens, too, had idiots.

At the same time, his stories often blaze with mundanity. The reader comes into a story as if walking in on an argument in progress, a play that started before the curtain rose, characters with baggage the reader can only assume. Maybe not much is happening, but it’s happening very fast.

An old man reads too much, and then his orphaned godson arrives on a rented mule. A romantic suitor suddenly joins the army and goes off to war. A shy man gets a taste of popularity. A priest compulsively researches the stories of his flock. Through characters engrossed in the banal we delve into the depths of the human experience where souls, by definition, cannot be mundane.

One of literature’s mysterious ironies is the common tendency for writers to be a bit removed from the humanity they explore so deeply. Machado de Assis was no exception. Though immersed in the social sea of late 19th century Rio, he was, in ways, incommunicado. He was shy, short, slight, fragile. He stuttered. His eyesight failed with age. He was the wrong color in a time of slavery, which wasn’t abolished until 1888.

And once in a while his epilepsy took him on forays to a dark and secret place, a petite mort metaphorically akin to the one Roland Barthes called the objective of reading literature. In fact, his epiphanic moment, when he abandoned his silly romanticism and adopted a more serious literary vision, came to him as he recovered from a devastating illness at a sanitarium outside of Rio in 1880. Though too weak to hold a pen, he was able to stutter to his wife his defining masterpiece, Brás Cubas, a tale told from the perspective of the dead.

Not ten years after the end of slavery in Brazil, this grandson of slaves helped found the Brazilian Academy of Letters, and he served as its first president as the 19th century turned into the 20th. His fellow founders were intellectual monarchists who shared his fear that Brazilians were not capable of governing themselves. Their fears were as prescient as his insights into society and the soul. Brazilians would treasure him through a tumultuous century and then into the next. They still hold him dear. He still lives, and for that matter, so does Brazil.

This is the Introduction to New London Librarium’s new collection of translations titled Ex Cathedra: Stories by Machado de Assis — Bilingual Edition. The book  consists of 21 stories, most never before translated. The stories appear in Portuguese and English, side by side. Translations were done by 16 translators in or from the U.S., U.K., Brazil, or Portugal. Glenn Alan Cheney is the managing editor, one of the translators, and author of the Introduction. For more information, see NLLibrarium.com/cathedra

He is currently a celebrated author with more than fifty published titles, and has continued his work in favor of the poor and disenfranchised of his country. His defense of the Liberation Theology put him in odds with the Vatican especially during the reigns of the last two popes, who did everything to crush the movement.

That, however, did not at all diminish his efforts – in fact, during the Lula government he led “Fome Zero,” the administration’s major social projects that successfully reduced death rates due to malnutrition among low-income children in the country.

His stance in defense of the disenfranchised and his disagreements with church orthodoxy have also made him a target for more conservative Catholics in the country, who tend to be very critical of his proximity with the Left.

On his first mystery novel (he is mostly a non-fiction writer) published in 1999 in Brazil but finally made available in English via Bitter Lemon Press, we follow a mysterious murder in a boarding house in downtown Rio de Janeiro: one of its residents is found stabbed and decapitated, and to top it off his eyes were removed.

There are no leads or any evidence that his room was broken into, so suspicion falls on all the other residents: a civil rights activist, a reporter, a drag queen, an aspiring actress, a political aide, the house’s administrator and her two employees.

The detective assigned to the case is Olinto Del Bosco, who is an old-school kind of cop used to the harsh methods of the days of the dictatorship in lieu of the more scientific approach found on today’s procedural mysteries – meaning that he will use torture to get what he wants, even if there is no evidence to back up his theories.

We are then given a profile of the different characters and their backgrounds – “Seu” Marçal, the victim, was a retired widower who peddled precious gemstones from Minas Gerais and also had a penchant for younger women.

The other residents of the hotel are a microcosm of Brazil itself, and we are presented with their backgrounds and the stories that led them to share that space.  This being a Frei Betto novel, a lot of the current (at least as of 1999)  social and political and social issues of the country are very present, going from police and political corruption to drug use, child prostitution and street violence.

Hotel Brasil is not for the faint of heart:  Without giving out any spoilers, just sixty pages into the book two women fall into prostitution rings, there are two gruesome murders and a brutal rape – and that is just as we are introduced to the main characters.

“Postcard” Rio is barely mentioned in the tome, except for the famed Lapa Arches and the omnipresent figure of Christ the Redeemer. The action mostly takes place between Rio’s City Center and the favelas – no strolls around Copacabana or Ipanema to be seen here.

The novel was translated by Jethro Soutar, who chose to keep some Portuguese expressions intact.  These were not untranslatable word like “saudade,” but words that are easily translatable. For instance, Inspector Del Bosco is often referred to as “delegado,” which means “deputy chief” or simply “investigator”, while at one point one woman is accused of being a “puta” (whore).

During an interrogation, one witness interjects “Pelo amor de Deus,” which simply means “For God’s sake.” I am not sure how that would work with monolingual readers who do not understand some Portuguese – and though it is an interesting gimmick, I find it to be an extremely ineffective tool.

Having said that, I found Hotel Brasil to be really gripping, and its twists and turns kept me guessing until the very end.  I am a pretty frequent mystery reader, and I often guess who the murderer is – but this was not the case.

All my suspicions were wrong, and when the last page came, I just asked myself, “What the…” – which makes this a must-read for lovers of the genre.

<font size=”1″>  Hotel Brasil

By Frei Betto

254 pages

Bitter Lemon Press, $ 14.95 (e-book version available)</font>

Ernest Barteldes is a freelance writer based on Staten Island, New York. He can be reached at ebarteldes@yahoo.com. This article appeared in The Brasilians.

Voices of the Desert recounts the story of Scheherazade, the Vizier’s daughter who singlehandedly wages psychological warfare against the Caliph of Baghdad, an overweight, middle-aged man who is exacting revenge against his wife, the Sultana, who defiantly slept with another man. He had them put to death. After that, he began taking a virgin bride every night and in the morning would order her execution.

Into this epidemic of senseless deaths steps Scheherazade, determined to put an end to it, and of course there’s no way of knowing if hers is an altruistic folly or simply a meaningless martyrdom. Where has she acquired such self-assurance and bravery?

It should be emphasized that this is not a fairy tale or an entertainment to be read for colorful thrills. Piñon immerses us in Scheherazade’s endless fears and anxieties. Each evening she weaves a tale, assuming the roles and voices of countless characters, young and old, male and female, but she also leaves the Caliph with a little cliffhanger, some unfinished thread that will convince him to stay the sentence of death for one more day.

Each evening, when the Caliph enters the chamber where Scheherazade awaits (her only companions being her elder sister, Dinazarda, and the slave girl, Jasmine), he engages her in perfunctory sex, mere copulation without joy, then rearranges himself and sits back to hear her stories.

They are, of course, the tales in (or associated with) The Thousand and One Arabian Nights, Sinbad and Aladdin and Ali Baba and all the rest, colored with impressions drawn from Baghdad marketplaces when Scheherazade was a girl, or, more recently, since she cannot leave the palace, from the devoted Jasmine (after all, the three women have to combine their resources, especially as the weeks and months drag by).

Despite the daily copulation, Scheherazade has no affection for the Caliph. “She is struggling for her life,” Piñon writes early on, “obeying the instinct of narrative adventure and passion for justice.” A hundred pages later, her goal and focus remain unchanged: “to save the young women of the kingdom caught in the sights of a despot.”

And, again, a hundred pages more: “Her strategy is to gain time and suffer the Caliph’s stony heart, to have him rescind the curse cast upon the young women of the realm, and only then to flee.”

The achievement of Voices of the Desert is in the way that Piñon forces us to agonize with her female characters. If the Caliph is displeased and tires of the stories he need only gesture to the executioner who stands guard outside the entrance to the chamber. Dread and apprehension are a veil, and they’re never lifted.

This comes at a price, in that the weariness of the characters and the harrowing repetition of their day-to-day lives in turn emanates from the page. There is not very much excitement here in what the reader is given; presumably all the excitement is in the tales that Scheherazade somehow, almost miraculously, is able to conjure up. We receive only hints of those stories, but never the stories themselves. In the end there is no reason for us, unlike the Caliph, to remain on the edge of our seat.

Possibly there’s a short story or a novella here, but Voices of the Desert runs out of steam. Piñon’s female readers may tap into psychological levels that male readers may not, and it’s even possible to see the book as a meditation on storytelling and the creative process, but this reader was not entertained, and so it’s a good thing he’s not the Caliph or heads would roll.

Excerpt:

Scheherazade has no fear of death. She does not believe that worldly power as represented by the Caliph, whom her father serves, decrees by her death the extinguishing of her imagination.

She tried to persuade her father that she alone can break the chain of deaths of maidens in the kingdom. She cannot bear seeing the triumph of evil that marks the Caliph’s face. She will oppose the misfortune that invades the homes of Baghdad and its environs, by offering herself to the ruler in a seditious sacrifice.

Her father objected when he heard his daughter’s proposal calling upon her to reconsider but failing to change her mind. He insisted again, this time smiting the purity of the Arabic language, employing imprecations, spurious, bastardized, scatological words used by the Bedouins in wrath and frolic alike. Shamelessly he marshaled every resource to persuade her. After all, his daughter owed him not only her life but also the luxury, the nobility, her rarefied education. (…)

Despite the Vizier’s protests when faced with the threat of losing his beloved daughter, Scheherazade persisted in this decision, which really involved her entire family. Each member of the Vizier’s clan evaluated in silence the significance of the decreed punishment, the effects that her death would have on their lives.

Service:

Voices of the Desert, by Nélida Piñon, translated by Clifford Landers (Alfred A. Knopf, 254 pp., $24.95)

Bondo Wyszpolski is the Arts and Entertainment Editor for Easy Reader newspaper in California.

I am not questioning the authors mentioned but the method. In fact, I am a fan of Visconde de Taunay’s documentary work, important character in the romance “Avante Soldado: Para trás.”

A handful of times, the unqualified press critiques literary works. If one needs to list the one-hundred most influential works, then choose twenty authors and five of their pieces and consider it done.

These authors should include: Alberto da Costa e Silva, Ivan Junqueira, Lima Barreto, Geraldo Ferraz, Benito Barreto, Otávio de Faria, Esdras do Nascimento, Mário Chamie, Josué Guimarães, Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil, Moacyr Scliar e Raimundo Carrero – all of whom were left out of the Bravo!’s list.

Some of the list’s strengths are including Father Antonio Vieira who came to Brazil from Portugal when he was six years old and Ukraine-born Clarice Lispector who migrated when she was seven.

It’s worth noting the authors whom I suppose must have been used as bibliographic references. In the last forty years, not one of them has written a piece that has added to our literature. It’s as if, during the Paraguayan War, a similar list were compiled exclusively with authors from the 18th century.

Pity the literature which depends on a book such as “O Que é Isso Companheiro?” by Fernando Gabeira, documentary born out of political praxis urgency, which by no means should replace an established work. 

If the criteria leads to works other than romance, short stories and narratives such as juvenile literature (another omission), then we must remember Gylberto Freyre, Carlos Guilherme Mota and Augusto Meyer.

I suspect that is what caused the insertion of Euclides who is neither a poet nor romance or short story writer, but whose “Os Sertões” could not have been excluded.

The list gets some authors right but not their works. “Seminário dos Ratos” is not Lygia Fagundes Telles’ best piece. The haste with which the list was elaborated did not go unnoticed. Paulo Leminski’s romance “Catatau” is cited as a reference when he should have been mentioned in the poetry section.

Other books by Rubem Fonseca are better than his inaugural work “A Coleira do Cão;” as it also happened with João Ubaldo Ribeiro because “Sargento Getúlio” is superior to “Viva o Povo Brasileiro.”

In sum, the list does not serve as a guide to our literature. Perhaps, it should have been made by genre thus avoiding the habitual mistakes and injustices inherent in such task.

100 essential Brazilian books, according to Bravo! Magazine

Title and authors name separated by comma.

Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, Machado de Assis

Dom Casmurro, Machado de Assis

Vidas Secas, Graciliano Ramos

Os Sertões, Euclides da Cunha

Grande Sertão: Veredas, Guimarães Rosa

A Rosa do Povo, Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Libertinagem, Manuel Bandeira

Lavoura Arcaica, Raduan Nassar

A Paixão Segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector

Macunaíma – o Herói Sem Nenhum Caráter, Mário de Andrade

Lira Dos Vinte Anos, Álvares de Azevedo

O Tempo e o Vento, Erico Verissimo

Morte e Vida Severina, João Cabral de Melo Neto

Vestido de Noiva, Nelson Rodrigues

Serafim Ponte Grande, Oswald de Andrade

Crônica da Casa Assassinada, Lúcio Cardoso

Os Escravos, Castro Alves

O Guarani, José de Alencar

Romanceiro da Inconfidência, Cecília Meireles

Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma, Lima Barreto

São Bernardo, Graciliano Ramos

Laços de Família, Clarice Lispector

Sermões, Padre Vieira

As Meninas, Lygia Fagundes Telles

Sagarana, Guimarães Rosa

Nova Antologia Poética, Mário Quintana

Navalha Na Carne, Plínio Marcos

A Obscena Senhora D, Hilda Hilst

Nova Antologia Poética, Vinícius de Moraes

Brás, Bexiga e Barra Funda, Antônio de Alcântara Machado

Paulicéia Desvairada, Mário de Andrade

I-Juca Pirama, Gonçalves Dias

Baú de Ossos, Pedro Nava

A Vida Como Ela É, Nelson Rodrigues

A Alma Encantadora Das Ruas, João do Rio

Estrela da Manhã, Manuel Bandeira

Obra Poética, Gregório de Matos

Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, Jorge Amado

Marília de Dirceu, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga

Claro Enigma, Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Mar Absoluto, Cecília Meireles

Malagueta, Perus e Bacanaço, João Antônio

O Pagador de Promessas, Dias Gomes

Noite Na Taverna, Álvares de Azevedo

Romance D’A Pedra do Reino e o Príncipe do Sangue do Vai-E-Volta, Ariano Suassuna

Bagagem, Adélia Prado

Viva o Povo Brasileiro, João Ubaldo Ribeiro

Memórias de um Sargento de Milícias, Manuel Antônio de Almeida

Cartas Chilenas, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga

Canaã, Graça Aranha

Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar, Oswald de Andrade

A Coleira do Cão, Rubem Fonseca

Espumas Flutuantes, Castro Alves

Um Copo de Cólera, Raduan Nassar

A Estrela Sobe, Marques Rebelo

Poema Sujo, Ferreira Gullar

Lucíola, José de Alencar

O Ateneu, Raul Pompéia

Fogo Morto, José Lins do Rego

O Quinze, Rachel de Queiroz

Seminário Dos Ratos, Lygia Fagundes Telles

Invenção de Orfeu, Jorge de Lima

Terras do Sem Fim, Jorge Amado

Broquéis, Cruz e Souza

O Encontro Marcado, Fernando Sabino

A Moreninha, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo

Morangos Mofados, Caio Fernando Abreu

O Ex-Mágico, Murilo Rubião

O Picapau Amarelo, Monteiro Lobato

As Metamorfoses, Murilo Mendes

Harmada, João Gilberto Noll

Ópera Dos Mortos, Autran Dourado

O Cortiço, Aluísio Azevedo

A Escrava Isaura, Bernardo Guimarães

200 Crônicas Escolhidas, Rubem Braga

O Vampiro de Curitiba, Dalton Trevisan

O Coronel e o Lobisomem, José Cândido de Carvalho

Os Ratos, Dyonélio Machado

O Analista de Bagé, Luis Fernando Verissimo

Febeapá, Stanislaw Ponte Preta

O Homem e Sua Hora, Mário Faustino

Catatau, Paulo Leminski

Os Cavalinhos de Platiplanto, José J. Veiga

Avalovara, Osman Lins

Eu, Augusto Dos Anaw6kx

O Que É Isso, Companheiro?, Fernando Gabeira

O Braço Direito, Otto Lara Resende

Quarup, Antonio Callado

A Senhorita Simpson, Sérgio Sant’Anna

Tremor de Terra, Luiz Vilela

Zero, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão

Galvez, Imperador do Acre, Márcio Souza

Viva Vaia, Augusto de Campos

Galáxias, Haroldo de Campos

Inocência, Visconde de Taunay

Poesias, Olavo Bilac

O Tronco, Bernardo Élis

O Uraguai, Basílio da Gama

Juca Mulato, Menotti Del Picchia

Contos Gauchescos, João Simões Lopes Neto

Deonísio da Silva, PhD, is a writer and professor of Brazilian literature at Estácio de Sá University. His most recent books include the novel Goethe e Barrabás  and the essay A Língua Nossa de Cada Dia (Our Everyday Language). He writes for Observatório da Imprensa where this article appeared originally.

Translated from the Portuguese by Aldo Jansel. You may reach him at ajans001@fiu.edu.

The images of the dreadful event that shook the city on the morning of
December 6th, 1957, are still fresh in the memories of its citizens. Swimming in
puddles of blood were the corpses of Wanderley Matteucci, his wife Lourdes
Pinheiro, and four young children, in the bedroom of his home, located at the
74th Street, at the back of the “São Mateus” warehouse, owned by the victim.
(1)

The passage above is just one of the many reports published by the newspapers in the city of Goiânia, about an episode known as “The 74th Street Crime”, in which the couple Wanderley and Lourdes Matteucci, and their children Walkíria (6 years old); Wagner, 5; Wolney, 4 and Wilma (8 months) were brutally murdered.

Except for Wagner, who was hanged with a tie and stabbed, all the other members of the family were killed with an ax. The only survivor was Wânia Márcia, who was also their daughter and was, at that time, around two years old.

The first suspect arrested was Rubens de Oliveira, also known as Alberto D’Lassere. He was captured in Salvador, in the state of Bahia, where he confessed to be the one who committed the crime. However, after being transferred to Goiânia, he denied his guilt. He was the main suspect just because he left the city on the dawn of the day that the crime took place.

The second suspect was Pedro Vaz, whose name was, in fact, José Lázaro da Silva, commonly known as Lazinho, but he couldn’t have committed the crime, because he was in jail in the city of Patos de Minas, in the state of Minas Gerais, at that time.

Afterwards, they arrested Wilson Matteucci, Wanderley’s brother, and Santino Hildo da Fonseca, accused of being hired by Wilson to kill the family. Both also admitted they were guilty.

Following his arrest, Santino told the police that Francisco da Silva Rocha helped him to murder the Matteucci family. Then, he made a detailed report of the crime, which read like a movie script.

Another suspect was named by Maria Cardoso da Silva, maid of the family. According to her, Gercino, Lourdes’ brother, had threatened to kill the couple after they had an argument.

The fact that all the accused people promptly confessed to the crime can be explained by the torture sessions they experienced:

“Yesterday, around 10 o’clock, after being slapped and hardly punched, Santino confessed to be the only killer. (…) The reporters got the information that Wilson Matteucci confessed under continuous beatings inflicted on him by the police, and was also subjected to all kinds of torture known by the law agents. (…) Francisco da Silva Rocha, the supposed accomplice of Santino, didn’t take part in the crime. We know, however, that he didn’t show up to defend himself, because he was afraid of being beaten up.” (2)

The newspaper Ed. Extra published that Wilson “was forced to stand up for hours and hours on the top of open tomato sauce cans, with wide open arms, holding two bricks on the palms of his hands”, and that Santino “was severely beaten up and tortured with a paddle, on his hands and buttocks.” (3)

In the course of the judicial process, Wilson and Francisco denied everything and were finally acquitted on October 14th, 1964, after staying in jail for a long time. Santino, however, didn’t deny his guilt, for he was “warned that he would be killed if he intended to contradict what he had ‘confessed to’ previously” (4), and was sentenced to 74 years and 10 months. He was just released on May 27th, 1976, but even then he alleged he was innocent.

The facts exposed above, especially the transcription of the statement made by Santino, inspired Miguel Jorge to write his novel Veias e Vinhos (Veins and Wines).

In 1981, the book was awarded by APCA (Association of Critics of Art from the State of São Paulo). It also won the 4th National Literature Contest sponsored by the Office of General Education, Cultural Foundation and the Caixa Econômica Bank from the State of Goiás.

Veias e Vinhos is divided in 39 chapters and brings an epigraph that expresses its content very well: “How many terrible things are committed in the name of justice.” (5)

Its cover was made by the plastic artist Siron Franco, who was the first person to enter the house of the Matteucci family after they were killed. He was a friend of the children murdered, was around 10 years old at that time, and, everyday, he used to call them to go to school:

“Because nobody answered that day, I went to the back of the house and saw a hole on the wall. I remember that after I went inside, while walking, I kicked an arm. I tried to go outside, but I couldn’t.” (6)

The narrator in the book is, initially, the only daughter that wasn’t murdered, named Ana by Miguel Jorge. In spite of the fact that she was very young, and not even being able to speak many words, she is the one who tells the details of how her father (Matheus), her mother (Antônia), and her brothers and sisters (Mário, José, Vilda and Valmira) were killed, as well as the fact that the murderers had wiped their hands, covered with blood, on the walls and then went to the kitchen to drink some beer and eat sausage.

An ax and a dagger were used to commit the crime, but Ana wasn’t killed just because one of the murderers lost his courage when he walked to the cradle, in order to kill her, and she said: “daddy”.

Then, Ana starts telling the story of her family before the day of the crime.

Her parents owned a warehouse called “São Judas,” located in the Popular neighborhood, where they were helped by Pedro, Matheus’ brother. Antônia had constant nightmares and was pregnant with a fifth son. Matheus had another daughter with a woman who lived in the city of Belo Horizonte, and he intended to bring her to live with them. At the beginning of the story Matheus’ mother, who is a little crazy, also lives with them.

Ana tells all the details of the story from the day of the crime until the day she was born, which takes place in the 17th chapter. Following that, we learn what happened after the tragedy.

Pedro is the main suspect. The alleged reason for it was the fact that he hated Matheus, and blamed him for the suicide of their mother, who took formicide in 1952. Pedro is tortured until he confesses:

“They took him from there and hung him on the pau-de-arara (one of the most common “instruments” to torture people), upside down. His statements start to hesitate at the same time that his right eye began to fail. The interrogation became more and more brutal. The soldier and the police chief laughed. They used all sorts of techniques and many possibilities for torture.” (7)

After facing a new hearing, Pedro denied his participation in the crime and, to escape from new torture sessions, he accuses Altino da Cruz and Felisbino Primo da Silva. After that, Altino is tortured and even goes through a kind of hypnosis session, carried out by an investigator called Raimundo Quirino, so he would sign the confession of his guilt. Even Ana is taken to see him to evaluate her reaction, but she hugs him, not expressing any kind of fear.

Pedro is acquitted by the jury of the city of Goiânia, on February 5th, 1963, and again on October 14th, 1964. In this same session, Altino is convicted to 74 years and 10 months.

While in jail, Altino starts to write a diary and decides to try to find out the real guilty ones. After more than 18 years, he finally gets his conditional freedom.

Although the novel is clearly based on the “74th Street Crime”, Miguel Jorge affirms that his book “isn’t a journalistic report, but a work of fiction novel.” (8)

However, we can classify it, more accurately, as a nonfiction novel, which is the kind of novel that presents “narratives, where verifiable information, in the form of a report, are dressed in narrative techniques, typically used in fiction.” (9)

The genre predominated in Brazil during the decade of 1970s, along with the magical realism, as an immediate consequence “of the political censorship that, prevented reporters from writing what they knew, and forced them to find in literature the space that was denied to them.” (10)

The nonfiction novel is a genre that was inspired by the book In Cold Blood, written by Truman Capote in the USA, in 1966, which, coincidently, also tells the story of the murder of a whole family. (11)

Rildo Cosson, in his book Romance-Reportagem: O Gênero, states that a nonfiction novel follows realist narrative processes and shows, among others, elements such as memories; flash-backs; true date, location and documents; premonition; stream of consciousness; and social denunciation.

In Veias e Vinhos, Miguel Jorge elects Ana, the only survivor of the slaughter, as the main narrator. She is responsible for telling the beginning of the story, by remembering the day of the crime and starting a long flash-back that shows the daily life of her family until the fatal day.

However, Ana is not the only narrator. The same role is played by her father, Matheus, her brother, Mário, and her uncle Pedro. This interweaving of narrators “allows for the existence of many intersections in the plot and, consequently, the mutual validation of all them.” (12)

Sometimes the narration is made in the third person, but the first person predominates and the narrator is always omniscient.

The true dates and locations are present in the novel and can be checked through documents and reports published in the papers at that time, which also published statements used in detail in the plot of Veias e Vinhos.

Premonition is expressed by the character Antônia, who has constant nightmares, as described below:

Antônia dreamed that two men wanted to kill her, and saw herself dead, slashed. She wanted to cry, but had no voice. She wanted to run, but her legs didn’t obey her. Finally, she tried to hide, but they caught her with a fishing net as if she were a wild animal. Then she tried to distinguish a voice that talked louder than the others, a commanding voice, a voice that chased her through the whole dream. Antônia didn’t know how to explain for how long that torture had lasted. An eternity? She woke up suffocated in screams and tears. (13)

The stream of consciousness is clearly present in the book, especially in its last chapter, where, ignoring the existence of paragraphs or punctuation, the character Altino expresses his thoughts, while in jail.

The social justice critique, very common in nonfiction novels, is also strongly present in Veias e Vinhos. Miguel Jorge uses the book to denounce the disregard and incompetence of the police. For example, the guns used to commit the crime and the fingerprints of the murderers were simply ignored; the fact that all the suspects were tortured; and, above all, the prison of an innocent man, who was kept in jail for almost twenty years.

Miguel Jorge even visited Santino in the prison for three times, and all of them he said he was not guilty. When he was set free, in 1976, he, once more, alleged he was innocent.

All the facts presented above allow us to conclude, undoubtedly, that Veias e Vinhos belongs to the nonfiction novel genre.

The book was used as a source for a documentary called O Caso Matteucci (The Matteucci Story), made by the moviemaker João Batista de Andrade, in 2002, and also the movie Veias e Vinhos, which had its première in Goiânia, on September 6th, 2006.

Those who attended it were João Batista de Andrade, the writer Miguel Jorge, and the actress Eva Wilma. Leonardo Vieira, Simone Spalladore, Leopoldo Pacheco, and José Dumont, among others, were also part of the cast.

Miguel Jorge also helped the director to write the first script of the movie, and the time of the crime was moved from 1957 to 1964, in order to emphasize the state of terror that took place in Brazil during the military dictatorship.

Notes

(1)  DESLINDADO o mistério do assassino da Rua 74. Brasil Central, Goiânia, ano 28, n. 1-59, p. 1 e 7, 25 jan. 1959.

(2) WILSON Matteucci teria contestado a autoria do assassinato da Rua 74. Folha de Goiaz, Goiânia, p. 8, 16 jan. 1959.

(3)  CASO Matteucci, um erro judiciário. Ed. Extra, Goiânia, p. 11, 18 out. 1981.

(4)  Ibid., p. 11

(5)  JORGE, Miguel. Veias e vinhos. 2. ed. São Paulo: Ática, 1982. p. 7.

(6)  BORGES, Rogério; GUEDES, Rute. A arte imitando a vida. O Popular, Goiânia, 1 out. 2006. Magazine, p. 7.

(7)  JORGE, 1981, p.129

(8)  BORGES, 2006, p. 7

(9) COSSON, Rildo. Romance-reportagem: o gênero. São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado, 2001. p. 11.

(10)  Ibid., p. 17

(11)  Ibid., p. 19

(12)  Ibid., p. 53

(13) JORGE, 1982, p. 22

The book Veias e Vinhos has reached its 4th edition in Brazil , and Miguel Jorge is looking forward to publish it in English. If you can help him, or know someone who can do it, please contact him at migueljorge@uol.com.br.

Gilson P. Borges is a teacher in Goiânia, Brazil. You can reach him at Gilson_borges@hotmail.com.

"Over the last five or ten years, the number of translations has doubled. Before that there were few books and they were usually translated from other languages, but we are now at another phase, without the participation of third parties," said Hatoum.

He believes that this gain is partly due to the increase in the number of Arabic language, literature and Arab culture teachers at the University of São Paulo (USP).

Among these translators are Mamede Mustafa Jarouche, who won the Jabuti for translating into Portuguese "The Thousand and One Nights;" Safa Jubran, who translated "The Brothers", one of the three novels written by Hatoum, into Arabic; and Paulo Farah, who has been acting in partnership with the Itamaraty, the Brazilian Foreign Office, on initiatives to improve cultural ties between the Arab and South American countries.

The Arabic course at USP was established in the 1960’s by Egyptian professor Helmi Nasr, currently the International Relations vice president at the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce.

As examples of translations, he mentioned the work done by Jarouche, which is currently at its second volume, novel "Season of Migration to the North", by Sudanese author Tayeb Salih, translated by Safa Jubran; book "I Saw Ramallah", by Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, released in Brazil this year, "Midaq Alley", by the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Paulo Farah, and "Gate of the Sun", by the Lebanese Elias Khoury, which, according to Hatoum, is yet to be released in the country. Hatoum himself has already translated English texts by Palestinian intellectual Edward Said.

The writer from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, also pointed out the part played by the Institute of Arab Culture (ICArabe), established in 2004 by Brazilian intellectuals of Arab origin, in the promotion of events like photography exhibit Amrik, about the Arab influence on South America, and seminars about Arab culture.

"Events like these help establish a connection with the society," said Hatoum, who is also a member at the institute. Exhibition Amrik is currently at Galeria Olido, in the central region of the city of São Paulo, in southeastern Brazil.

After the Nobel

To Hatoum, "Arab culture has been greatly hidden by the West." Greater promotion of literature, according to him, began after Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. From then on there has been an effort, especially in Europe, to promote the culture, also due to a practical need, caused by the large volumes of Arab and Muslim people in the European countries.

"Europe has changed, countries like England and France have great Arab and Muslim communities. Therefore the European population needs greater dialogue with the Arab world," stated the writer. "A movement for closer ties between both cultures is necessary, there is no superior culture," he pointed out.

To him, however, modern European literature suffered an Arab influence at its origin, be it due to the Moorish occupation in the south of the continent, up to the 15th century, be it through works like "The Thousand and One Nights", translated into French around 300 years ago by Antoine Galland.

"Great French authors have paid homage to Arab culture, among them Proust, Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert. The latter, incidentally, stated that he had his soul in the East," added Hatoum.

In Brazil, despite the increase in the number of works available, the author from Amazonas believes that it is necessary to provide further incentive to the promotion of Arab culture, especially through sponsoring translations.

"Many times publishing houses do not want to run the risk of covering the cost of a translation, and it is therefore important to find sponsorship for the promotion of work that is really well done," he said.

A book that Hatoum believes would greatly interest Brazilians is "History of Beirut", by Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir, who passed away last year. "It is a wonderful book that tells the story of 2,000 years of history of Beirut, covering the Phoenician, Lebanese and Syrian civilizations," he declared. It is an example, however, of an expensive book to translate, as it is 700 pages long,

Cultural Bridge

On the other hand, he says that there is also a need to create in the Arab world greater interest in Brazilian and Latin American culture in general. The writer pointed out, however, that there are many possibilities for generating this interest. One would be the promotion of a Brazilian cinema festival in Palestine. "There is great Palestinian interest in Brazilian cinema," she said.

Apart from "The Brothers", translated into Arabic and released by Lebanese publishing house Dar Alfarabi, Hatoum has also had short stories published in Egypt and in the United Arab Emirates. "There is great literary life in the Arab world and a bridge must be built," he said.

He also stated that he has read various blurbs about his novel, even some praising Safa Jubran’s translation. "Many authors have read it, like Elias Khoury and Mourid Barghouti. Little by little, this causes an effect," he added.

Hatoum himself has already contributed to the promotion of Arab customs. His first two novels, "Tale of a Certain Orient" and "The Brothers", have as their scenery Lebanese immigration.

Son of a Lebanese father and of a mother who is of Lebanese descent, the author, born in Manaus in 1952, was strongly influenced by his parents and grandparents.

His father, Hassan Hatoum, who has already passed away, had a fabric shop in Manaus, called Esquina das Sedas (Silk Corner). He was also greatly interested in literature, so much so that he subscribed to literary magazines from Lebanon and Egypt.

Inspiration

A trip he took to Lebanon with his father in 1992 may serve as inspiration for a future non-fiction book. "It was a return to our roots, I was very touched by the trip," he said.

Apart from the beautiful historical monuments, the hospitality and the contact with relatives who had been separated by time and space impressed the author. "Lebanon is very Brazilian and Brazil is very Arab," he said.

"Ashes of the Amazon", which won the Jabuti this year, is not about Lebanese immigration, but, as is the case with his other novels, is set in the Amazon, also a great influence to the author.

"The book was written based on my experience in the 1960s and 1970s. It is a story of friendship and of a family drama," he said. The friendship, in this case, is between Olavo and Raimundo, the former an orphan brought up by impoverished uncles and the other, a son of rich parents.

Hatoum has won the award for the third time, one for each of his novels. "Winning this award is crossing a filter of hundreds of books. It was certainly a great surprise and should attract readers and help promote the novel," he said. "In Amazonas it was celebrated, as it is not common for writers from the state to receive the award," he added.

Hatoum’s next novel, which should be released next year, will also be set in the Amazon. "It will be a short novel about the myth of the enchanted city of the Amazon, on the river bed, which will serve as a pretext to tell the story of a family drama," he said.

In 2007 the author also intends to release a book of short stories and he should also spend some time giving literature classes at Stanford University, in the United States.

Anba – www.anba.com.br