Last month, I was thrilled to find a crime novel by a Brazilian author. It is a pity folks stick to reading ruts - there is a world of incredible beauty now pouring out thanks to translators around the world and the Net.
Edney Silvestre's background in the TV industry helps craft historical contexts.
Male-centric in focus, the narrative evidences the time. 12th April 1961 is where it all begins. Women are either nuns or sluts. Whatever the path, the ladies in the story suffer incredible austerity or gruesome tortures. In contrast, there is infinite tenderness in depicting the special ties typical of male friendships.
... extended passages of lively dialogue in which characters cut across one another in a way which combines stylistic bravura and confusion in equal measure, (and) must have presented translator Nick Caistor with quite some challenges... Silvestre’s writing reminded me of Henning Mankell, which surely bodes well for future translations into English and attracting the attention of TV executives.
The novel opens with a couple of teenage boys off for a frolic in a water body. There is something about boys, summer and water bodies. Remember Summer of '42? Perhaps not. Many now may not have seen the famous coming of age film from the Sixties.
For an enhanced experience, please scroll down to the music videos and play them as you read.
If I close my eyes now, I can still feel her blood on my fingers. If only I had closed my eyes then, or kept my mouth shut, not told anyone about our discovery by the swimming hole, we could have gone back to dreaming about spaceships.
Yuri Gagarin is in outer space...
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| Yuri Gagarin during training for his flight - Robert Couse-Baker |
How much has your background in journalism, playwriting and scriptwriting help you to write books?... My first novel, If I Close my Eyes now takes place at the height of the Cold War, as the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union is played out in the lives of two boys in a small town in Brazil.
Brazil, in the book, is a metaphor for the travails of changing times around the world.
Brasilia had been inaugurated less than a year earlier, but whichever of us got to be president was going to transfer the capital back to Rio. We were twelve. It was a different country. A different world.
If I Close My Eyes Now
Eduardo and Paulo bring an almost Enid Blytonish touch that contrasts nicely against the world of adult depravity which frames the crime. Played partly along the Famous Five lines but with a deft hand.
One cannot help but smile to learn that one of them is reading a Tarzan at the time of the events.
Above and beyond the historical or journalistic aspects, there is the aesthetic appeal of the book. If I close my eyes now, I see:
A few hours later, noisy alarm clocks or still-drowsy wives would awaken them, and they would leave beneath a sky as dark as the one they had left the evening before, their stomachs lined with the coffee and bread and margarine they had eaten standing up in the kitchen, taking with them their thermos and tin lunch boxes prepared the night before, walking along paved streets damp from the morning mist that formed bright haloes round the still-lit iron street lamps, even before the night-workers in the textile factory had finished their shift.
Not only does the writing have a lyrical appeal but music plays through the narrative:
Agustin Lara
Nabucco - Va pensiero - Verdi
The nobility of art is to turn anything and everything into eternal beauty. When every shred of human decency is torn off, the mysterious victim, whose death is offered to the reader as opening libation, remains tenuous. For it is not about this terrible crime. Or that one that happened earlier.
...Eduardo and Paulo, and Ubiratan, an old man who spends all day playing chess against himself and lies about his past... each in his own way an outcast from society, reveal the hypocrisy, corruption and savagery of their community as they uncover the tangled truth behind the murder.
Under the guise of murder mystery, the novel comments on how even good intentions can lead to unfortunate cover-ups. Religion, in the form of the Church, is also shown to be part of the tangle of lies - malicious and destructive. All these booby-trap lives. There are no heroes, though one is inclined to root for the protagonists. But are there villains?
Good literature provokes and proceeds along questions. Youth is a time of endless questions. The boy with the better background is shaken to the core when he sees how the poor live. His mind is beset with questions - why this and how come that and so on. Edney's portrayals of the boys is how it is - around twelve one can be unbearably pretentious and philosophical.
The tragic event is the small pebble triggering a whirlpool:
Eduardo’s worries included a fear he had never known before: what if he had no future? The future that until that morning, in the headmaster’s office, he had taken for granted. What if in Brazil, in this new Brazil where industries, highways, jobs, were springing up all the time, what if in this new Brazil, even though, as their teachers taught them, it was a democracy, where we, the people, have free elections and can choose who is to govern us, what if in this Brazil there were powers, forces he could not describe or explain, or point to where they were lurking, what if they existed, those forces, those powers that could decide his destiny without him being able to do anything about it?
Around Eduardo, Paulo and Ubiratan revolve peripheral characters, in equally sublime portraiture: the brutish father and brother of Eduardo, Paulo's genteel family, the nun, the powerful men and a host of others come to life through Silvestre's poetic prose.
This juxtaposition of innocence and depravity is told
... in deceptively simple prose, bringing home the full shock and horror of the subject matter by filtering it through the eyes of children.
The book is not for the prude.
Reader should note it contains very graphic accounts of disturbing sexual practices.
As an Indian, I could strongly relate to the Brazil of that time - our country also echoed some of the issues Silvestre exposes. The story is a parable for all times.
Filtered through childhood eyes, this story of incest, exploitation and corruption in high places is told in deceptively simple prose. The back story of Brazil as it lurches into the developing world permeates the whole book and provides a haunting back-drop to unlikely friendships in a time of innocence and hope.
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