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GLAUCO ORTOLANO
Rubem Fonseca. A Grande Arte
1983. (Eng. High Art, 1986)
Nélida Pifion. A República dos Sonhos
1984. (Eng. The Republic of Dreams, 1989)
João Ubaldo Ribeiro. Viva o Povo Brasileiro
(Long Live the Brazilian People). 1984.
Paulo Coelho. O Alquimista
1988. (Eng. The Alchemist)
Brazil Not for Beginners
(Hindrance). 1991.
Aramis Ribeiro Costa. Uma Varanda para o Jardim
(A Verandah Onto the Flower Garden). 1991.
Patrícia Melo. O Matador
(The Killer). 1997.
Deonísio da Silva. Teresa
1997.
Sérgio Sant'Anna. Um Crime Delicado
(A Delicate Crime). 1997.
Moacyr Scliar. A Mulher que Escreveu a Bíblia
(The Woman Who Wrote the Bible).
the most challenging tasks to be given
to a literary critic is that of compiling a list of the best
works of a certain region of the world. He or she will
find this to be particularly true if given an assignment
to cover the literature of a country endowed with such
a rich variety of regional and urban literatures as is the
case with Brazil. Finding what some may call a "national" literature in a country of such complexity is almost
impossible. The Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos
Jobim was once asked during an interview to explain
the roots of Brazilian music. After giving a very lengthy
reply, Jobim concluded with the following words of
wisdom: "As you see," he told the mesmerized interviewer, "Brazil is not for beginners." And if its music —
or any other form of artistic expression, for that matter
— is not for beginners, neither is its literature.
Although my "top ten novels" list for the past
twenty years is presented in chronological order according to the year of first publication of each work, it
PERHAPS ONE OF
Chico Buarque de Hollanda. Estorvo
2000.
SPECIAL RECOGNITION: Jorge Amado. Tocaia Grande
(Big Ambush). 1984.
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY SUMMER/AUTUMN 200189
Ro bert H. Taylo r
sales, not usually associated with highcoincidentally starts out with a writer
quality literature, he can also be
many critics consider to be the very
regarded
as a good writer, if not for
best postmodern representative of
capturing the imagination, then at
Brazilian literature. In the words of
least for capturing the soul of his readthe American critic James Polk,
ers. His recognition as a good writer is
"Rubem Fonseca is a writer of joyful
increasing now, and even the Brazilian
excess." His masterpiece High Art
Academy of Letters has been considerhas been translated into a rapid-fire
ing him as a candidate to fill Jorge
English which seems to compensate
Amado's recently vacated chair. The
for the work's many different rhetorAlchemist was Coelho's first novel to
ical leveis. High Art is a masterpiece
achieve great global success and is
of the mystery narrative. But more
MOACYR SCLIAR
perhaps a good introduction to his
than that, it has become a paradigm
works.
of the contemporary urban novel. Its
Francisco (Chico) Buarque de Holcharacters are like thousands of
landa has long been known as one of the most imporBrazilians who find in a criminal life their only recourse
tant voices of l3razilian poetry and drama during the
to fight a corrupted political system.
cultural counterrevolutionary years since 1964, when a
The
Republic
of
Dreams,
The second novel selected,
military coup ushered in two decades of martial rule in
which has also been translated into English, marked the
Brazil. Chico is also known as one of Brazilian popular
U.S. debut of this most acclaimed Brazilian novelist outmusic's best lyricists of ali time. Estorvo (Hindrance) is
side of Brazil. Nélida Pifion's novel brings four generaone of his earliest novels, but it already deserves some
tions of a family of Spaniards struggling to adjust withof the same praise that has been applied to his poetry
in the complex social structure of Brazil. The Republic of
and drama. Full of faceless and nameless characters livDreams is perhaps the best example of the power of
ing in a chaotic Brazilian metropolis, this novel conveys
narrative. For this work, she was awarded the
well the psyche of an unplanned urban society. Estorvo
1995 Juan Rulfo Prize, one of the most prestigious literwas also made into a film that represented Brazil at the
ary awards in ali of Latin America. In the 199os, PitIon
Carmes Festival in 2000, but that version did not enjoy
also became the first woman ever elected to preside
anything like the success achieved by the book.
over the disting-uished Brazilian Academy of Letters.
Even though Aramis Ribeiro Costa is a member of
(Long
Live
the
Brazilian
Viva
o
Povo
Brasileiro
For
the
Bahian
Academy of Letters and an outstanding litPeople), João Ubaldo Ribeiro was nominated for memerary representative of the state of Bahia, unfortunately
bership in that same Academy of Letters. Ribeiro comes
for readers, he is not nearly as well known as his prom-_
from a traditional line of great Brazilian writers from
inent Bahian colleague, João Ubaldo Ribeiro. His novel
the state of Bahia — the same Bahia that has inspired
Uma Varanda para o Jardim (A Verandah Onto the
some of Jorge Amado's best works. With this 700-page
Flower Garden) is a story about love and hate, decepnovel, he recounts four centuries of Brazilian history in
tion and self-deception, that one can easily trace back to
the voice of a character who passes through a series of
the influences of Machado de Assis, arguably the greatsoul transmutations and lives many lives on the subest Latin American novelist of the nineteenth century,
tropical island of Itaparica, the same island where the
and Eça de Queirós, a Portuguese master of the same
author himself was bom. lhe result is a mesmerizing
period. Either way, Costa comes from a noble lineage of
novel for anyone who wishes to get acquainted with the
masters of narrative in the Portuguese language.
history of this huge Latin American nation while also
Patrícia Melo, the youngest author of my list, wrote
enjoying the talents of a true storyteller.
the carefully crafted novel The Killer in 1997 at the age
Our next author is considered the second most
of thirty-four. lhe story is a brilliant portrait of a comwidely read Latin American writer ever, behind only
mon man who falls into an escalating life of violence
Gabriel García Márquez. For that alone, Paulo Coelho
and moral depravity despite his best intentions. lhe
deserves a place on any Top Ten list. Several critics in
novel
came at a time when urban violence in Brazil was
Brazil would deny his literary talent, attributing his
surpassing the acceptable limits of tolerance, and it prosuccess merely to an opportunistic marketing strategy.
voked considerable debate on the implementation of
Others will argue that, despite his huge audience and
90WORLD LITERATURE TODAY SUMMER/ AUTUMN 2001
capital punishment. Melo is also a playwright and a
screenwriter who is well on her way to becoming one of
the most prominent voices of the younger generation of
authors. The Killer was recast into English by Clifford E.
Landers, an experienced translator of Brazilian authors.
Deonísio da Silva is another Brazilian author
deserving even wider recognition than he currently
enjoys with the public. Winner of several literary
awards, including the prestigious intemational Casa de
las Américas Prize, he is still viewed with suspicion by
literary critics for being a professor of literature at São
Paulo State University. For his masterpiece Teresa, which
cost him several years of research in Portugal and Brazil,
Silva received the National Library Prize. This biographical novel on Santa Teresa d'Avila is unlike anything
written before or after it.
Recognized as one of l3razil's foremost contemporary urban novelists, Sérgio Sant'Anna published what
may arguably be his best novel in 1997. In the words of
a scholar from Brown University, A Delicate Crime "challenges the boundaries between art and life." In 1998,
Sant'Anna won Brazil's most prestigio us literary distinction, the Jabuti Award, in what was perhaps one of the
most competitive years since the prize's inception. That
same year, four other writers included on my list were
also in the running for the Jabuti, but their novels, as
great as they were, did not make it to the final ro und.
Like Fonseca's High Art, A Delicate Crime is one of the
masterpieces of contemporary Brazilian fiction, except
perhaps more delicate.
A Mulher que Escreveu a Bíblia (The Woman Who
Wrote the Bible) is a highly imaginative novel that transcends the boundaries of time and expression. It tens the
story of one of Solomon's wives, who, despite her lack
of physical beauty, had leamed what none of Solomon's
700 other wives and 300 concubines had ever dreamed
of. She could read and write, which gave her great prestige among the other wives. This novel is one of the best
representatives of what is called "irreverent literature"
in Brazil. It intercalates eloquent and highly complex
language with sometimes some very acerbic rationalizations. Moacyr Scliar, one of the best exponents and representatives of Jewish-Brazilian literature, won the Jabuti
Award in 2000 for this highly interesting novel, which
clearly announces his corning of age.
Special recognition above and beyond the Top Ten
listing goes to one of Brazil's best writers of ali time,
Jorge Amado, and specifically bis Tocaia Grande (Big
Ambush). Amado, who passed away in August 2000,
was Brazirs leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature following the death of João Guimarães Rosa
(1908-67). Unfortunately, the author of such classics as
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Gabriela, Clove and
Cinnamon, like Rosa, died before he could be honored
with a well-deserved Nobel. Amado is the single most
widely translated author from Brazil, and perhaps the
most recognized one as well. Like bis previous works,
Tocaia Grande also takes place in his native Bahia, a state
that became symbolic of all Brazil in the minds of so
many readers around the world.
There are of course several other Brazilian novelists
who deserve to be on this list, but unfortunately, my
space is too limited to represent more fully a country of
such magnitude. An author like Dalton Trevisan, for
instance, did not make the final cut, not because he is
anything less than a great novelist, but simply because
in recent years he has dedicated himself more to short
fiction than to full-length novels. Other important names
from the currently active generation of novelists include
Fernando Sabino, Marcelo Rubem Paiva, Domingos Pellegrini Jr, Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, Raduan Nassar,
Lygia Fagundes Telles, Autran Dourado, Osman Lins,
and Lya Luft, among so many many more.
r
University of Oklahoma
GLAUCO ORTOLANO is a Brazilian novelist who is currently
teaching in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Oklahoma, where he also serves as a
contributing editor to WLT.
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY SUMMER/AUTUMN 200191
rbscavering Isaac Babel
J. M. Meu le n hoff BV
MOACYR SCLIAR
ISAAC BABEL (1894-1941)
,2ILIAN1 AUTHORS have captured the hearts and
minds of the youth of my generation: Érico Veríssimo
northeastern state of Bahia. It was in Salvador, the capital of this state, that Amado established his residence,
(1905-75) and Jorge Amado (1912-2000), who only re-
and it was this same city that became the preferred
cently passed away. As an avid reader, I have always
backdrop for his fiction. Salvador is simply breathtak-
been enchanted by the works of these writers for their
ing, not only because of the natural beauty of its beach-
superb narrative skills. Furthermore, I have had some
es and landscape, but also because of its mystical atmo-
personal reasons to read their works as well. Veríssimo
sphere as the center of the nation's African-Brazilian
lived in my hometown, Porto Alegre, and the city was
cults. But Amado used to travel frequently, and when-
always present in his novels. He also wrote about Rio
ever he carne to visit Porto Alegre, he stayed as a guest
Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil and the
in the home of my cousin Carlos Scliar, a painter who
homeland of our legendary warriors and cowboys, the
illustrated many of his novels. Every time the great
gaúchos. Amado, on the other hand, lived in the distant
writer carne to visit us, he was received with much fes-
92WORLD LITERATURE TODAY SUMMER/AUTUMN 2001
tiveness and celebration. Many people went to Carlos's
home just to see this legendary author, and that included me, a very small boy who gazed up at him in a profound state of awe and tried to absorb every word that
came out of his mouth.
Jorge Amado was a politically engaged writer.
Bom in 1912 and a member of the so-called generation
of 1930, which was represented in Brazil by authors like
Graciliano Ramos and in the United States by Michael
Gold, Amado was a strong advocate of socialist ideais.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was still a recent event
when he was a young man, and it somehow seemed to
point the way forward for Brazilians and for Latin
Americans in general. Like Brazil, Russia was a large
country endowed with considerable natural resources
but still underdeveloped, with a predominantly agrarian economy and a government based on a quasi-feudal
regime. As the son of a landowner in the cacao-plantation region of Ilhéus, in the south of Bahia, Amado
knew that regime ali too well but was never able to
accept it. At a very early age, he opted to become both a
militant for the Communist Party and a writer. His first
novel, O País do Carnaval (The Land of Carnival), was
published when he was only twenty years of age. In
spite of his exuberant imagination, he still had to conform to the demands of "socialist realism," which transformed the works of several Soviet and other communist writers into mere propaganda pamphlets. Later on,
tired of this vigilance and disillusioned with Stalinism,
Amado abandoned the Communist Party and changed
his style radically. He became far more sensual (reflecting the great womanizer that he was) and far more
"fantastic," not very far really from the magic realism of
a Garcia Márquez.
The first novel I ever read by Jorge Amado was Os
Capitães de Areia (Eng. Captains of the Sands, tr. Gregory
Rabassa), a marvelous story. lhe main characters were
poor and ordinary children of Salvador who lived by
the beach in the port district of the city. They were
homeless children who did not attend school and needed to steal in order to survive. lhe problem of juvenile
delinquency is a huge one in Brazil, mainly because it is
associated today with drug trafficking in the favelas
(shantytowns) and other poor districts spread ali over
the Brazilian megalopolises. But Amado saw the other
side of these children, the human, the romantic, even
the heroic side. lhe head of one of the gangs, Pedro
Bala, was a character that the young people of my generation could easily identify with. When I started to
write, Pedro Bala was a literary model for me. As a
coincidence, even a symbolic one, the book was published in 1937, the same year I was bom. As a writer, I
was no longer simply an admirer or a reader of Jorge
Amado; I was his disciple.
As I started to mature more and more as an individual, and as a reader and a writer, I also began to
notice some of the problems with the fiction of Amado.
Actually, these were some of the same problems the
critics were pointing to. His texts were careless, often
contained errors, and he seemed content with certain
developed formulas that repeated some of the same
characters again and again. I used to compare his texts
with those of Isaac Babel (1894-1941), which I discovered later on in life. Like my parents, Babel was a Russian Jew (actually they ali carne from neighboring villages), and like Amado, he was also a militant, with the
difference that he had actually engaged in combat during the Russian Revolution. Babel had a greater transcendence, though, one that left an even stronger
impression on me. I've read his short story "Awakening" at least twenty times. His childhood in Odessa corresponded exactly to my own in the Jewish district of
Bom Fim in Porto Alegre.
I have never read Captains of the Sands again, however. lhe detective stories tell us the criminal should
always retum to the scene of the crime. Passionate
reading is in a way a transgression, and so we run the
same risk as does the delinquent when we return to the
literary passions of our childhood. Of course, in this
case the risk is more one of becoming frustrated or disappointed. I continued to be both a friend and an admirer of Jorge Amado. I've also read other novels of his.
Tent of Miracles is a superb analysis of the peculiar
racism found in Brazil, yet I prefer to keep Pedro Bala
foremost in my sentimental memory. He is still there,
running through the streets of Salvador, the hero of my
childhood, the hero with whom I would like to run side
by side, if I only had the legs and the imagination of the
young Moacyr Scliar.
Porto Alegre, Brazil
Translated by Glauco Ortolano
MOACYR SCLIAR is Brazirs most important and most distinguished Jewish writer. Working primarily in short fiction, he
has published more than a dozen prose collections and has
been translated into many languages. Among the collections
available in English are The Carnival of the Animais (1968), The
Tremulous Earth (1977), and Van Gogh's Ear (1989). He is serving as a member of the 2002 Neustadt Prize jury and has frequently been reviewed in the pages of WLT.
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY SUMMER/AUTUMN 200193
FROM CLOSE BY
NINE SELECTIONS
ODYSSEUS ELYTIS
TRANSLATED BY JEFFREY CARSON AND NIKOS SARRIS
WITH THE APPEARANCE of From Close By, we can now see
that Odysseus Elytis's last three volumes compose a
trilogy, wherein old age and death are transformed into
spiritual youth and regeneration, as in Shakespeare's
romances. The first volume, The Elegies of Jutting Rock,
peers into Alice's mirror — the Approach. lhe second,
West of Sorrow, moves in and out — the Confrontation.
And From Close By is a necessarily cryptic communication and recall — the Entry and Look Back. Ali three
are written with sparse punctuation, sudden transitions, telescoped grammar, and unidentified references.
In his last book, Elytis (1911-96; Nobel 1979) employs
lyricism, aphorism, memory, and quotation, in prose as
Photo: lva r lvas k
often as in verse. Difficult, it will endure.
From Close By was published posthumously in
Greek (as Ek tou plísion, Athens, Ikaros, 1998, 87 pages,
96o-7721-39-X) and so was not included in our Collected
Poems of Odysseus Elytís (Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1997). It was readied according to the poet's
wishes by Ioulita Iliopoulou. — Jeffrey Carson & Nikos
FRANCE, 1975
94WORLD LITERATURE TODAY SUMMER/ AUTUMN 2001
Sarris
Dom Jaime Spengler
Chanceler
Irmão Joaquim Clotet
Reitor
Irmão Evilázio Teixeira
Pontifícia Universidade Católica
do Rio Grande do Sul
Vice-Reitor
Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil
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Regina Kohlrausch
Espaço de Documentação
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Coordenador Executivo
II
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