A reading list for Brazil - To the victor, the potatoes!

Brazil today, a shorter list, thank goodness.  To patriotic anonymous Brazilian visitors, be patient, read carefully, and be constructive – thanks in advance!

José de Alencar’s 1865 Iracema is a good place to start.  It is true post-colonial literature, a conscious early attempt to separate  Brazilian literature from Portugal.  Closer to a prose poem than a novel, I think it is more than a curiosity but a long ways from a masterpiece, as I said way back here, in the process offending a touchy, hasty visitor.

A few years later Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis succeeded in creating world-class Brazilian literature by a different path entirely, by adapting European literature to his own genius and locale, which happened to be Brazil.  All I am saying is that he does not rely on local color or artificial exoticism. An amazing proportion of what he wrote has migrated into English.

The Hand and the Glove (1874)
Helena (1876)
Iaiá Garcia (1878)

These books represent the first period in Machado de Assis’s career, when he wrote what I will call “plain ol’ novels.”  I am reading Helena now.  It is – what is the appropriate technical literary term? – it is OK.  I will finish it for research purposes, but then will avoid this phase unless there is special pleading.

In 1880 or so, Machado de Assis experienced some sort of health crisis and became an entirely different writer.  I do not know what happened, but his future fiction would be funnier, stranger, audacious, penetratingly ironic.  Everything changed, or almost everything.  This is the core set:

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881, also translated for some reason as Epitaph for a Small Winner)
The Psychiatrist  (1882, a satirical novella)
Quincas Borbas (1891,  also translated, because it describes the book well, as Philosopher or Dog)
Dom Casmurro (1899)
Esau and Jacob (1904)
Counselor Ayres’ Memorial (1908)

I have read the first two, as well as some excellent short stories, and am eager to read some or all of the last four.  They are all fairly short.  I have Quincas Borbas in front of me – I stole that thing about potatoes from it, Ch. 18.  This novel has 267 pages and 201 (!) chapters, some – I am reverting to The Posthumous Memoirs – digressive or otherwise perplexing, including, and I am again thinking of Bras Cubas, a famous one line chapter.  A short line, I mean.  Machado de Assis works on opposite principles from our great Modernist long sentence wonder workers.  He wants to smash his scenes to pieces, not stretch them out.  His narrators, as you might guess, are less than reliable, his literary allusions many, his approach to the world skeptical.

The Posthumous Memoirs seem to have become the representative Machado de Assis work among English readers, but I have read that this puzzles Brazilians; Dom Casmurro is the one they stuff down the throats of squirming schoolkids. Or perhaps Brazilian students are less neurotic about school reading than Americans.

I do not know if anyone is particularly interested in this, but Machado de Assis is, in the terms we use in the United States, black, a descendant of slaves.  In Brazilian terms, I have no idea, because I do not understand their complex racial classifications.

Some Brazilian non-fiction has been translated.  I doubt I will read Manuel Antonio de Almeida’s 1852 Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant or João Capistrano de Abreu’s 1907 Chapters of Brazil’s Colonial History 1500-1800 on my own, but I would be happy to read them with company.  Both are part of the Oxford University Press Library of Latin America series, which also publishes the late Machado de Assis novels as well as Aluísio Azevedo’s 1890 The Slum, an angry, possibly gritty, novel.

The one piece of Brazilian journalistic or historical writing that has caught my eye is Euclides da Cunha’s 1902 Rebellion in the Backlands or Backlands: The Canudo Campaign.  An account of the suppression of a provincial rebellion is turned by Euclides into something more complex, much of the complexity coming from the elaborate language of the book.  The style of the book has become as important as the subject.  Please begin here at Caravanas de Recuerdos for a description and samples.

I was poking around the internet, trying to figure out if Euclides da Cunha should be referred to as “Cunha” or “da Cunha,” only to discover that everyone just calls him Euclides!  All right then.

A final reminder:  any Brazilian poetry is fair game for a shared read, as is Portuguese poetry from Angola or Mozambique or Newark, New Jersey.  I have no list, though; my ignorance is total.

Corrections and additions are, as always, encouraged.

There is poison in its sweetness – José de Alencar’s Iracema, a Brazilian classic, I am told

José de Alencar short novel-like book Iracema (1865), is an early classic of Brazilian literature, or so I am told. Few readers will see it as much more than a curiosity, I suspect. That works out well for me, though, because I’m a curious fellow.

Iracema is the story of a beautiful Indian maiden who falls in love with a Portuguese soldier. When they first meet, she shoots him with an arrow, but as soon as he’s wounded, she’s smitten. She loves him more than he loves her, which leads to all sorts of trouble. They have a son, who represents the Brazilian mix of native and conqueror, but as we see in the first chapter, when we meet the soldier, the boy, and their dog, but no lovely Indian maiden, the new world has no room for poor Iracema.

“Represents”? Yes, the novel is an allegory about Brazil. Neither I nor you nor pretty much anyone has much interest in Romantic allegories about noble Indians and Brazilian identity. And there’s nothing too special about the story itself, which is quite simple, and borrows a bit from Cooper’s novels and a lot from Chateaubriand’s bizarre, lovely forest fantasy Atala (1801). But there’s something more interesting going on. Alencar builds the allegory right into the language.

Some examples:

“Neither smiles nor color had the Indian maiden; neither buds nor roses has the acacia that the sun has singed; neither blue nor stars has the night saddened by the winds.

The pajé’s daughter shuddered. It is thus that the green palm shudders when its fragile trunk is shaken; the spar is bedewed with the tears of the rain, and the flycatchers rustle softly.

The juriti, when the tree dies, flees the nest where it was born. Never again will happiness return to Iracema’s breast…

The honey of Iracema’s lips is like the honeycomb that the bees make in the andiroba trunk: there is poison in its sweetness.

They walked side by side, like two young deer who at sunset cross the capoeira, the second-growth land, withdrawing into the retreat from which the breeze brings a suspect scent.”

These are all from Chapter VIII, which I picked randomly. The chapter is less than three pages, and I omitted a number of other possibilities. The book is filled with sentences like this.

All of the figurative language in the novel uses the natural world, real plants, real animals. The metaphorical language is continual – there’s a comparison every four or five lines. Most of it uses local flora and fauna, and Indian names, although some European critters slip in here and there. A little nightmare for the translator; great job, considering.

Iracema is a conceptual novel, self-consciously experimental. Alencar is trying to rework the Portuguese language, to make it Brazilian. The poetic metaphorical language drawn from nature is the tool he uses to do it.

I would guess that most people reading these samples will not find them to their tastes; nor do I. But I thought the figurative language had a cumulative power over the course of the book, more like a poem than a novel (and fortunately the book has only 113 pages). As an experiment, it may be a failure and a dead-end – possibly this is what is typically meant when calling a novel “experimental” – but I was glad to see how it worked. It fails in an interesting way.

Iracema is part of the Oxford University Press Library of Latin America series. Unlike the Machado de Assis novel, a real masterpiece, that I read last year, Iracema was copy-edited.

Here’s one reason I don’t just read my Humiliation list. Active curiosity; what’s this, what’s that. I found Iracema while poking around at the library, for example. One never knows.