Gonzalo Barr

Through most of Mario Vargas Llosa’s childhood, he was told that his father was dead.  Then one day, he was taken to Lima and introduced to a man who turned out to be his father. The event later surfaced in his first novel, La ciudad y los perros (translated into English as The Time of the Hero and made into a film entitled, The City and The Dogs).  The starting point of all his books, Vargas Llosa said in an interview with Brazil’s Globo TV, are his memories.  They are the raw material of fiction.  (The interview was conducted by Edney Silvestre in Rio de Janeiro for Globo TV. Silvestre asked his questions in Portuguese and Vargas Llosa answered them in Spanish.  The translations to English are mine.  This post first appeared with the video embedded below.  The video has been removed.)

Vargas Llosa’s father shipped him off to a military academy in order to “cure” him of his goal to become a writer –

My father distrusted literature a lot.  He thought that literature was a recipe for bohemianism, economic failure, and that it was not very virile.

Instead, Vargas Llosa took his experience at the Leoncio Prado military academy and turned it into his first novel.  While living at the military academy, he read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, all of Alexander Dumas, and others.

For me [reading] was a kind of resistance against a system that I rejected viscerally. … I didn’t know it [then] but literature was a way of living that was completely in contradiction to that authoritarianism, [against] that control. Literature was liberty.

Literature is the last front of the liberties we have. That’s why in authoritarian, totalitarian countries, literature is so important as a form of resistance for those who write and those who read.

Vargas Llosa’a first novel was published in Spain after being rejected by other publishers and was very well received thanks, in part, to the Peruvian military, who held a great bonfire in the same academy where the novel takes place –

That inquisitorial act [the burning of the book by the Peruvian authorities] resulted in great publicity for the book.  I have always asked myself whether the success of the book was due to its merits or to that inquisitorial act.

On a more personal note (not far from the theme of rebellion, this time against family), Vargas Llosa also spoke about his first marriage, at 18, to the sister of the wife of his uncle. (I know there is a more concise way of describing the relationship, but I wanted to underline the fact that they were not related by blood, something he points out too.) Why marry so young? Silvestre asked.

Love. Love has no age. And besides it was a love that my family rejected. So then love became mixed with rebelliousness.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot — Vargas Llosa studied law in Peru before he left for Madrid to complete his doctoral studies in literature, publish his first book, and become a full-time writer.

Photo:  Mario Vargas Llosa at the Miami International Book Fair, 1985, Miami-Dade College Archives, Wikipedia; Source: Edney Silvestre entrevista o jornalista, escritor, crítico literário e dramaturgo peruano Mario Vargas Llosa.  Ele fala sobre verdade e mentira, política e América Latina, Globo TV (removed from the Internet)

Brazil has a population of 190,010,647. It is by far the most populous lusophone country in the world. I have no idea the number of Brazilians in the US, but there must be many because they are everywhere. They are certainly everywhere in Miami.  And I don’t mean as laborers, I mean businessmen, bankers, and developers. We have gotten more than an earful of Brazilian music since the heyday of bossa nova and samba. One song, “The Girl from Ipanema,” is so well known that an otherwise educated American can be forgiven if he believes it was written by an American. (Your correspondent was sitting at a table in a café bar on the corner of Rua Vinícius de Moraes and Rua Prudente de Moraes in Ipanema when a colleague from a Boston firm insisted to half a dozen patient and tolerant Brazilian lawyers who were our hosts that the song had in fact been written by an American. He did it with the degree of certitude that anyone else would use to affirm that, well, yes, of course the earth is round. Fortunately, Brazilians are among the nicest people on the planet and, in any case, the embarrassment was washed away with another round of caipirinhas, even if the story made its way around the legal community in Rio.)

We know their music, we know the tanga and Havaianas. In Miami, you can have a feijoada or rodizio at any number of restaurants.

So where are the Brazilian writers? Where is their literature? We get some Jorge Amado and too much Paulo Coelho, but what about the others? What about Rubem Fonseca, Patrícia Melo, Clarice Lispector, Roberto Drummond, Paulo Lins, Moacyr Scliar, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, to name a few? Most of these writers are still alive and writing.

Let’s start with Rubem Fonseca, who has enjoyed a long career as the successful author of many bestsellers and who, as I post this, is on the eve of turning 83 years old this May.  A few of his books have been translated to English, they just haven’t gotten much mention. First, some background.

Fonseca was born the state of Minas Gerais in 1925, but moved to Rio de Janeiro when he was eight years old and still lives there. He studied and graduated with a law degree (so he qualifies as the second entry in the newly-minted “Law School and Writers” category).  In 1953, he began a career in the police, reaching the position of police commissioner until he resigned five years later in 1958.  He continued to work, then dedicated himself to writing full-time.  (Unfortunately, the wikipedia entry in Portuguese only says that he worked “na Light,” in a company or division called “Light,” but no more.)

He published his first three books, plus an anthology, between 1963 and 1973. They were collections of short stories entitled, Os prisioneiros (The Prisoners, 1963), A coleira do cão (The Rage of the Dog, 1965), and Lúcia McCartney (Lucia McCartney, 1967). His first novel, O caso Morel (The Morel Case) appeared in 1973.  Since then, I count twelve novels and numerous collections of short stories.  Four of his short stories appeared in the excellent anthology edited by Italo Moriconi, Os cem melhores contos brasileiros do século (2000), one of the first books I bought in Brazil, there at Saraiva on Rua do Ouvidor in downtown Rio. The anthology pretends to gather the 100 best Brazilian short stories of the twentieth century. If you have never read any Brazilian literature and if you can make your way through the Portuguese, it is a good introduction to the letters of a rich and unique country. (For one thing, Brazil was the only colony I know of that became the imperial capital for a while. When Bonapartist troops threatened Portugal, the emperor packed up and moved his entire court to Rio.  When Brazil became independent, it was a monarchy before it became a republic.)

I don’t understand why we don’t have more lusophone writers translated into English, especially when you take into account the long and close political relationship that England and Portugal have had.   The only English translations of Fonseca’s works that I have been able to find are, The Lost Manuscript (translated by Clifford Landers), which doesn’t help me identify the original Portuguese title as none of his books are called anything like that, Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts (translated by Clifford Landers), and High Art. According to the wikipedia article in English on Fonseca, two other works of his have been translated, Bufo & Spallanzani and most recently, The Taker and Other Stories (translated by Clifford Landers).

Of Fonseca’s work, I have read the novels, Agosto and Vastas emoções e pensamentos imperfeitos, the latter of which is available in English, the former in Spanish, French, and German. Both are murder mysteries. Usually, I do not read murder mysteries but, I confess, if it takes place in Rio, I will read it. Regardless of my bias, the books are well-written and the plots tight. I also read the short story collection, Pequenas criaturas (Little Creatures), which was entertaining. From what I read, Fonseca is nowhere near as audacious as, say, Loyola de Brandão, about whom I posted earlier, but who has even fewer of his books translated into English.

Fonseca is also an accomplished scriptwriter and filmmaker. I have not addressed this facet of his work because it would have made this post even longer.

Every year we are publishing more books in the US. Yet books written in a language other than English remain rare, which is puzzling. Just when you think that the economic and political reality, if not the Internet, would force us to shed some of our provincialism, we seem to be comfortably ignorant of the rest of the literary world.

Update August 9, 2008:  Clifford Landers, who has translated numerous works from Portuguese into English, including works by Fonseca and Melo from Brazil and Lobo Antunes from Portugal, kindly clarified a few titles in his comment below, but I will repeat what he wrote here as well.  The Lost Manuscript was the title given to Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts in the UK.  He also wrote, “The translation of Bufo and Spallazani was published by Dutton and is out of print but can be found by searching on the Internet.”  His transtion of The Taker and Other Stories will be out November 2008. Many thanks for the clarification.

Sources: articles on Rubem Fonseca, Wikipedia, biography and bibliography from the author’s website

So many writers were once law students or lawyers that I have decided to start a category entitled, “Law School and Writers.” Originally, I had thought of calling this new category, ”Literary Lawyers,” except that the term would be too limited in scope.Medical students and physicians become writers too, but the number is much smaller. And it makes sense. While physicians are trained to listen to the patient tell the history of his complaint and to observe for signs and symptoms of illness, both abilities that are very useful to any writer in the realist vein, lawyers are trained to work with words. They are the lawyer’s only tool. Words are also the only tool available to the writer (barring the few writers who incorporate images or photographs, as did Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and W.G. Sebald).

But rather than start with a real case — like Flaubert, who dropped out of law school just as he was falling in love with the Code Civil or Balzac, who read an article of the Code Civil each day before writing, or even Boccaccio, who practiced law and was a failure at it before he began to write — in this first entry, I chose a fictitious one, that of a character in a novel whose uncle and aunt force him to go to law school when what he really wants to do is write.

When I first read Los detectives salvajes by Roberto Bolaño last year, I did not like it.  I found it too gimmicky.  There’s a smooth story that runs out of gas around page 90 and makes up the first section.  There are countless painfully detailed interviews in the second section.  And a third section that works as a kind of “where are they now,” peppered with visual jokes about sombrero-wearing Mexicans.  Reading the novel was like eating a plate of week-old rigatoni straight from the refrigerator.  But my colleagues in Europe, Bartleby les yeux overts, dernière marge, and Tabula Rasa have each recently written incisive reviews of Bolaño’s work and made me take a second look.

This is the opening of Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives). Although the work has been translated to English, I found the translation too American-sounding. I admit that my version is a bit flat-footed, but in my view it retains more of the original phrasing –

2 de noviembre

He sido cordialmente invitado a formar parte del realismo visceral. Por supuesto, he aceptado. No hubo ceremonia de iniciación. Mejor así.

3 de noviembre

No sé muy bien en qué consiste el realismo visceral. Tengo diecisiete años, me llamo Juan García Madero, estoy en el primer semestre de la carrera de Derecho. Yo no quería estudiar Derecho sino Letras, pero mi tío insistió y al final acabé transigiendo. Soy huérfano. Seré abogado. Eso le dije a mi tío y a mi tía y luego me encerré en mi habitación y lloré toda la noche. O al menos una buena parte. Después, con aparente resignación, entré en la gloriosa Facultad de Derecho, pero al cabo de un mes me inscribí en el taller de poesía de Julio César Álamo, en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, y de esa manera conocí a los real visceralistas o viscerrealistas e incluso vicerrealistas como a veces gustan llamarse.

* * *

2 November

I have been cordially invited to form part of Visceral Realism. Of course, I have accepted. There was no initiation ceremony. Better that way.

3 November

I do not know very well what Visceral Realism is. I am seventeen years old. My name is Juan García Madero. I am in the first semester of law school. I did not want to study Law but Literature. But my uncle insisted and finally I ended up surrendering. I am an orphan. I will be a lawyer. That’s what I told my uncle and my aunt and then locked myself in my room and cried all night or at least a good part of it. Afterward, appearing resigned, I entered the glorious Law School, but after one month, enrolled in the poetry workshop run by Julio César Álamo, in the School of Philosophy and Letters. That way I met the real visceralists or viscerealists and even vicerealists, as they like to call themselves sometimes.

Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes (1998)

Bolaño never attended law school.

Revision:  Our friend, Cuchitril Literario, also wrote a post on Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 (2006).  The novel is 1123 pages in Spanish and 912 pages in the English translation due out later this year. 2666 was the author’s last work before dying of chronic liver disease at the age of fifty.

Sources, Nick Caistor, “Roberto Bolaño:  Chilean creator of ‘infrarealism,’” The Guardian (July 17, 2003), Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes