Showing posts with label Brazilian writers. Show all posts

Monday, February 19, 2024

The Hen by Clarice Lispector

Hen

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Elizabeth Bishop

She was a Sunday hen. She was still alive only because it was not yet 9:00 o’clock.

She seemed calm. Since Saturday she had cowered in a corner of the kitchen. She didn’t look at anyone, no one looked at her. Even when they had selected her, fingering her intimately and indifferently, they couldn’t have said whether she was fat or thin. No one would ever have guessed that she had a desire.

It's Chilly in Here, Don't You Think? by Lygia Fagunes Telles

It's Chilly in Here, Don't You Think?

by Lygia Fagundes Telles
Translated from the Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker

She slowly extricated her hand from his grip and turned toward the wall. A blank white wall, not a single picture or even a nail mark—nada. If only there were a tiny hole left from a nail she could crawl into and disappear. She suddenly remembered the small insect struggling to crawl into the lime mortar, forcing itself into a small opening before it disappeared, fleeing. It’s easier to escape when you’re an insect, she thought, and folded her hands. What’s the first thing you do after making love? was the moronic question all those morons answered on the talk shows. I light a cigarette and lie there looking at the ceiling, some said amid giggles. Others provided more detail: I throw on my boxer shorts and grab a beer from the fridge. Or chicken wings. More giggles. And the talk show host never remembered to ask how they would react in a more delicate situation, when nothing happened at all. Where was one supposed to look? She turned back toward Armando, who was propped up against the headboard, with his elbows on the pillows, smoking and listening to music with an expression of pure ecstasy. I’m nothing more than a disgusting romantic, she thought.

Lygia Fagundes Telles

LYGIA FAGUNDES TELLES, MASTER OF THE HUMAN AND THE FANTASTIC

By Lorena Sales dos Santos

April 6, 2020

My first contact with the work of Lygia Fagundes Telles was during my early years of college, during a summer vacation. My mother, who was an avid reader and had recently started to write some short stories, was reading Telles’s book Antes do Baile Verde (Before the Green Ball would be the literal translation of the book’s title). The book was first published in 1969 but has had several other editions. Since I was looking for something to read during the lazy afternoon hours of the summer, when I returned from the beach to be with cousins and friends, my mother offered me the book she had just devoured so fast.

Lygia Fagundes Telles, Popular Brazilian Novelist, Dies at 98

Credit...
Photo by Chico Albuquerque

Lygia Fagundes Telles, Popular Brazilian Novelist, Dies at 98

One of her country’s first writers to address female sexuality from a woman’s perspective, she produced four novels and dozens of short stories that could be read as political allegories.

Michael Astor
April 4, 2022

Lygia Fagundes Telles, one of Brazil’s most popular writers, whose stories of women trapped in unsatisfying relationships could also be read as allegories of her country’s political situation, died on Sunday at her home in São Paulo. She was 98.

Lygia Fagundes Telles

and Manuel Alegre

BOMB 102

Winter 2008

The Brazilian novelist and short story writer Lygia Fagundes Telles and the Portuguese writer Manuel Alegre met each other at the Book Biennial in Rio de Janeiro, which took place last September. Alegre is renowned in Portugal as a novelist, poet, and public figure with a long engagement in politics, from his early days as a law student opposing the 40-year dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveria Salazar (1933–74) to his imprisonment and exile in Algiers, to his running for president in the 2006 Portuguese elections. Alegre traveled to Brazil to participate in the launching of his book Cão como nós (A Dog Like Us), a lyrical memoir featuring his family’s relationship with Kurica, an epagneul breton, their companion over many years.

6 essential works to know Rubem Fonseca’s literature

Rubem Fonseca

6 essential works to know Rubem Fonseca’s literature

April 16, 2020

Writer Rubem Fonseca died on Wednesday (15) at the age of 94, in Rio de Janeiro. He had a heart attack in his apartment, in the Leblon neighborhood, and was taken to the Samaritano hospital, but died in the early afternoon.

Placed among the greatest Brazilian writers of the 20th century, with special emphasis on his production as a short story writer, Fonseca debuted with the book “Os Prisioneiros”, in 1963. After a series of acclaimed volumes of short stories, he published his first novel in 1973, “ The Morel Case ”. He continued alternating the two formats throughout his career and, from 2011, published five editions of unpublished stories by Nova Fronteira. His most recent book, “Carne crua”, was released in 2018.

Known for his dry style, which portrays urban violence directly, Fonseca promoted a renewal in the Brazilian literature of the period, being credited for starting a new moment in national fiction from the 1960s. His work was a fundamental reference for Brazilian writers who graduated in the 1970s and 1980s, as stated by the professor of the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at USP (University of São Paulo) Edu Otsuka to Nexus.

Many of his narratives are closer to the police or “noir” genre, which paved the way for a more direct influence of American literature in the country, as the journalist Maurício Meireles said in Folha de S.Paulo. With that, Rubem Fonseca is usually pointed out as someone who combined the popularity associated with this market strand with a high literary quality. Although his work has been associated with violence, critics also highlight the lyricism and humor of his stories.

Themes, characters and prophetic vision

Among his characters, it is usually possible to identify a division between the marginalized and those who are part of a corrupt bourgeoisie, according to the entry on the author in the Itaú Cultural Encyclopedia. Through them, Fonseca deals with themes such as the bestiality of criminals, social hypocrisy and the abuses committed by the ruling classes. “The existential void, however, is equivalent, whatever the character’s origin”, says the text.

“ALTHOUGH HE BECAME KNOWN FOR THE VIOLENT STORIES THAT INVOLVE THE UNDERWORLD AND CHARACTERS FROM LOW SOCIAL STRATA, HIS TALES ALSO COVER OTHER FORMS OF VIOLENCE PRACTICED BY CHARACTERS OF BOURGEOIS CUT AND ‘RESPECTABLE’ APPEARANCE – RESULTING IN HIS VISION OF A UNIVERSE CROSSED BY A SUBSTRATE OF VIOLENCE AND SEXUALITY (ANOTHER RECURRING THEME), ONLY COVERED BY THE CIVILIZED SURFACE ”

Edu Otsuka

Professor at the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at USP

In 2017, literary critic Sérgio Rodrigues wrote that, in the 20th century, Fonseca’s literature was visionary, pointing “like a bazooka” to the future of Brazil.

“No one saw before him the country that was born from unbridled urbanization, where, free from semi-feudal brakes, our obscene inequality generated the social monster that today is bigger than Godzilla,” said Rodrigues in a review published in Folha.

To Nexus Otsuka goes in the same direction, stating that “Rubem Fonseca’s work fulfilled the function of literarily revealing the deviations from the brutal modernization that imposed itself on the country”, referring mainly to the books of the 1970s, which he highlights as the most significant period of the author’s production.

Repetition

Negative reviews, which accused the author of repeating the same formula (but without the same brilliance of his best phase), were directed mainly at some of the last books published by Rubem Fonseca, such as “Caliber 22” (2017) and “Carne Crua” (2018).

This repetition, especially with regard to the author’s raw report of violence, began to be seen in the 2000s. Critics began to argue that, instead of serving as a form of denunciation and social criticism, this repetition would have the effect otherwise, losing its strength.

There is also a contemporary discussion of Fonseca’s treatment of female characters and a possible misogyny present in his work.

From curator to writer

Rubem Fonseca was born in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, in 1925, but moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro as a child.

He graduated as a lawyer at the Faculty of Law of the University of Brazil in 1948 and, in 1952, he joined the police, as a commissioner in the district of the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of São Cristóvão. He worked on the streets until the end of 1954, then working as public relations for the corporation. The experience provided material for his literature.

Still in the 1950s, he also started to work as a professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas and public relations for the energy company Light, being exonerated from the police in 1958 due to the impossibility of accumulating his position with the other functions, in which he kept until dedicating himself only to literature, already in the 1980s.

A striking episode in his career was the censorship of the book “Feliz Ano Novo” (1975) by the military dictatorship. The work was already a success when it was banned on the charge of violating morals and good customs. The writer sued the Union, but the work only returned to bookstores after the re-democratization.

His political position in the period before the 1964 coup, however, was a matter of controversy. Rubem Fonseca was one of the directors of the Institute of Economic and Social Research (Ipes), an institution created by businessmen who opposed then president João Goulart. The Ipes produced anti-communist propaganda and supported the military coup and the regime that followed. Fonseca stated that he was part of an existing democratic wing at the institute, with which he would have ceased to have any relationship since 1964.

As a recluse, the writer rarely gave interviews and refused invitations to participate in popular literary events, such as the Paraty Literary Festival. His justification was that a writer cannot be well known, or he loses the possibility of observing and, with that, his raw material.

6 books to know Rubem Fonseca

The request of Nexus, editor and translator Heloisa Jahn, who edited Fonseca’s work for several years, selected six key books by the author, listed below in chronological order with brief comments.

‘The dog’s collar’ (1965) – short stories

“For its unadorned, direct, dry language, and for looking at the violence and contrasts of society and the country, it was a milestone in our literature. From then on, throughout the decade, each new book by Rubem Fonseca was an event of great impact in the cultural environment and of strong political significance, in the midst of dictatorship. The author won a large readership, which from then on accompanied him book by book. ”

“Lúcia Mccartney’ (1967) – short stories

“THE irony and tension are elements of style that help to build a panel of life in the city, in Brazil: the most different characters rush into their projects – and encounter the unforgiving reality.“

‘Happy new year’ (1975) – short stories

“Violence in society at all levels – not only in criminal acts -, at a time when institutional violence prevailed. Unmissable. Language takes on the brutality of what it narrates. ”

‘Bufo & Spallanzani’ (1985) – romance

“Irony and narrative technique; bizarre and obsessions, in progress of police romance. ”

‘August’ (1990) – romance

“Situada in 1954, the plot glues a fictional murder to the political reality of the crisis of the end of the Vargas administration. Impeccable historical reconstruction, tense atmosphere, literarily masterful.“

‘Hole in the wall’ (1995) – short stories

“Rubem Fonseca in full force. The stories are provocative and the sex is very present. ”

TIME 24 NEWS

Sunday, September 4, 2016

Clarice Lispector / A brief survey of the short story

A brief survey of the short story part 56:

Clarice Lispector

This darkly addictive Brazilian writer is more concerned with perceptions of objects than conventional plot structures

Chris Power
Wednesday 5 March 2014 13.48 GMT

In The Apple in the Dark, the novel Clarice Lispector completed in 1956, she writes about a man "abashed in front of the white page". His task is "not to write down something that already existed but to create something that would then come to exist". This challenge is one all Lispector's work confronts as it cuts away, sentence by sentence, at conventional conceptions of reality. Again and again she and her characters – the latter often against their will – penetrate beyond the everyday into what she describes in one story as "stranger activity". Her vivid and mysterious bibliography is the fascinating record of this process.

In Brazil (her family, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms, emigrated from Ukraine in 1921 when she was still an infant), Clarice Lispector became that unusual combination: an avant-garde artist who is also a household name. Fame arrived in the 1960s, two decades after she published her first book and a decade before she died, aged 56, from ovarian cancer. She had no particular desire for fame, just as she had no particular desire to be identified as an experimental writer. She never understood why readers found her work opaque, while the fact that she consistently attempted new things in her writing was, for her, simply necessary to her aim: "In painting, as in music and literature, what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and more difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye."

The difficulty is plainly discernible, the delicacy less so. "Probing the way in which consciousness perceives objects," one of her translators writes, "Lispector creates a world of exciting and terrifying perceptions." This world does not exclude tenderness or humour, but it is often coloured by an existential horror; as a reader of The Buffalo reported, "the whole story seemed to be made of entrails". In Love (1952), a Rio de Janeiro housewife, Ana, is jolted from her complacency by a glimpse from a tram of a blind man chewing gum, the mechanical movement of his jaw making him "appear to smile then suddenly stop smiling, to smile and stop smiling". Ana flees the tram and takes refuge in the city's Botanical Garden, but the way she perceives the world has altered radically:

"And suddenly, uneasily, she felt she had fallen into a trap. In the Garden a secret labour was being done that she was starting to perceive. On the trees the fruits were black, sweet as honey. On the ground there were dry seeds full of circumvolutions, like little rotting brains. The bench was stained with purple juices. The waters rustled with intense softness. The luxurious legs of a spider were fastened to the tree trunk. The crudity of the world was restful. And death was not what we thought."

As those last lines suggest, Ana's nightmarish vision is not so easily characterised as nightmare alone. Lispector's relationship with religion was complex but she had a mystic's regard for any level of perception that transcended blinkered normality, no matter how dreadful the revelation. Epiphanies of the Joycean type are a constant throughout her shifting body of work, but they are unusually raw and vertiginous. In one story the narrator declares that she "suddenly saw the chasm of the world. What I saw was as anonymous as a belly split open for an intestinal operation"; elsewhere a woman breaks a tooth and "instead of going to the dentist, she threw herself out of the apartment window". Lispector's biographer Benjamin Moser compares her to Kafka, in that her investigations often locate, in a spiritual sense, "locked doors, blocked passageways and generalised punishment". This moment-to-moment uncertainty makes reading her stories, in Caetano Veloso's description, "a dangerous adventure".

This sense of adventure applies not only to Lispector's concepts: it is endemic at the level of the sentence too. Paradoxes and sudden shifts lie in wait, and inattentive readers can rapidly lose their way. A story like The Hen and the Egg begins plainly enough – "In the morning I see the egg on the kitchen table" – but quickly spirals off into something like a prayer, a philosophical meditation, a language game and an absurdist monologue, flipping between grace, humour and unease. Moser draws a parallel between it and the "cubist portraits in words" attempted by Gertrude Stein. In The Fifth Story, another masterpiece, a woman prepares a mixture of sugar, flour and gypsum to kill the cockroaches that emerge in her apartment each night "like evil secrets" (cockroaches, a recurring symbol, appear even in Lispector's books for children). The story begins five times, the line "I was complaining about the cockroaches" becoming an embarkation point for a series of hypnotic and troubling explorations of death and morality.

The structure of The Fifth Story echoes Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In the Exordium, that book's opening section, Kierkegaard presents us with a man who tells himself the Old Testament story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac four times, each version changing the emphasis as a cubist painting might simultaneously present a face from multiple perspectives. The man is trying to understand the story, but the repetition suggests the failure of the attempt. ForZadie Smith this curious beginning to Kierkegaard's treatise is "a rehearsal: it lays out a series of rational explanations the better to demonstrate their poverty as explanations", and Lispector's narrator, too, is hunting a meaning that continues to elude her. When she views the "huge and brittle" dead cockroaches from her "frigid height as a human being", she is like a cruel god observing slaughtered innocents, her motives increasingly unknowable even to herself. "Using her experimental technique," writes K David Jackson, "Lispector has created another kind of labyrinth of stories, as in a hall of mirrors or a recurring dream full of the statues of death."

Labyrinths proliferate, both in Lispector's work and in critical responses to it. Her translator Giovanni Pontiero notes that "she is less interested in conventional plot structure than a labyrinth of perceptions". Blake Butler finds her sentences "wired with psychosis, fixated on some kind of understanding of the dark maze of every day". In the late story In Search of Dignity (1974), a woman becomes lost first in the endless corridors of the Maracanã stadium, and later in the suddenly unrecognisable streets of Rio. Lispector's fiction swarms with such moments of threatening intensity. The feminist theoristHélène Cixous, who took up Lispector's work in the 1970s as a prime example of what she calls "écriture féminine", identifies "an intense worry" running through her work. In its blend of high tension and domestic settings (the most common Lispector character is the housewife) it recalls elements of Katherine Mansfield, whom Lispector adored, and Virginia Woolf, whom she read only after reviewers noted similarities between them.

In fact Lispector was often compared with writers – Woolf, Joyce, Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre – whom she then went on to read for the first time. The critics' attempts are understandable: the more singular a writer, the more they try to find comparisons that ensnare the work. But read enough Lispector and you realise she has a habit of slipping these nets; she both is and is not a feminist, a postmodernist, an absurdist, a mystic. Rather than find an existing style that suited her project, she embarked on an individual quest to locate, as she put it in her first novel, "the symbol of the thing in the thing itself": the word that doesn't merely gesture towards something, but becomes it. Twenty years later, in 1962, she told an audience at the University of Texas that "there are some young writers who are a bit over-intellectualised. It seems to me that they are not inspired by, shall we say, 'the thing itself', but by other literature, 'the thing already literalised'." In her writing she was prepared to dispatch with all else – even words themselves – to get at this essence:

"Since one feels obliged to write, let it be without obscuring the space between the lines with words … The word fishes for something that is not a word. And when that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be thrown away with relief."

Translations from the work are by Benjamin Moser, Giovanni Pontiero and Alexis Levitin.

THE GUARDIAN

001 Anton Chekhov
002 HP Lovecraft
003 Mavis Gallant
004 Ryunosuke Akutagawa
005 Raymond Carver
006 Julian Maclaren-Ross
007 Etgar Keret
008 Robert Walser
009 VS Pritchett
010 Grace Paley

011 Katherine Mansfield
012 Heinrich von Kleist

013 Franz Kafka

014 MR James

015 F Scott Fitzgerald

023 JF Powers
024 Lydia Davis

025 Leo Tolstoy

026 JG Ballard
027 Jorge Luis Borges
028 Vladimir Nabokov
029 Eudora Welty
030 Bruno Schulz

031 Boccaccio

032 James Joyce

033 Deborah Eisenberg

041 Rudyard Kipling
042 Danilo Kiš
043 Flannery O'Connor
044 Frank O'Connor
045 John Cheever
046 Roberto Bolaño
047 Machado de Assis
048 Angela Carter
049 Guy de Maupassant
050 Ivan Turgenev

051 Sherwood Anderson

052 Juan Rulfo

053 Katherine Anne Porter
054 Dambudzo Marechera
055 Edgar Allan Poe

055 Edgar Allan Poe

056 Clarice Lispector

060 Italo Calvino

066 David Foster Wallace

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Machado de Assis / A brief survey of the short story

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Poster by T.A.

A brief survey of the short story part 47:

Machado de Assis

Still neglected by English readers, the Brazilian writer is one of the very greatest of the early modern era

Chris Power
Friday 1 March 2013 15.28 GMT

The Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is, to English-language readers, perhaps the most obscure of world literature's great short-story writers. Producing work between 1869 and 1908, Machado wrote nine novels and more than 200 hundred stories, more than 60 of the latter appearing after 1880. This date marks the point at which Machado metamorphosed from a writer of romantic trifles into a master of psychological realism, seemingly overnight. The Brazilian poet and critic Augusto Meyer compared the shift to the one between Herman Melville's earlier works and Moby-Dick.

The evolutionary leap is unquestionable, although the precise reasons for it are unclear. Indeed, many uncertainties surround the biography of Machado, who was an intensely private person. Perhaps it's no surprise that such a man should create a body of work that prizes the puzzle above the certainty. Meyer called ambiguity Machado's most prominent theme and the translators Jake Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu agree, seeing it as being "in part the result of his subjective, relativistic world view, in which truth and reality, which are never absolutes, can only be approximated; no character relationships are stable, no issues are clear-cut, and the nature of everything is tenuous." Machado writes with pleasurable clarity – he worked as a journalist for a time – but the straightforwardness of his stories is a camouflage for less obvious, more troubling cargo.

The theatre for nearly all these dramas of uncertainty is the Rio de Janeiro of the Second Empire (1840-1890), which sprawls from his pages as a humid, busy city full of intrigue, gossip and prejudice. Remarkably for a man who became a distinguished civil servant and founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Machado was the mixed race grandson of slaves (slavery persisted in Brazil until the 1880s), and received little more than an elementary education. Growing up poor on the outskirts of Rio gave him an outsider's eye on the bourgeois Carioca society he later joined. His work tirelessly satirises their human inadequacy, by turns savagely or with an ironic compassion. That someone of his background should become Brazil's greatest writer is, as one critic has noted, as if Tolstoy, rather than inheriting Yasnaya Polyana, had been born a serf.

Machado's most recent English translator, John Gledson, says the difficulty of translating him is capturing the right balance of distance, understanding and sympathy. Trapdoors to the unexpected open constantly in his work, from the sadism of "The Hidden Cause", or the bleak violence of "Father versus Mother", to the subtle play of what Michael Wood terms his "quiet, complicated humour". Reading him prompts thoughts of so many different writers that he can only be unique. Poe's chilling shadow falls across "The Hidden Cause" and "The Fortune-Teller". "The Alienist" glitters with Swiftian satire. Machado's shrewd, even devious work with the point of view of his narrators positions him alongside Henry James. Numerous stories anticipate the moral ambiguity of Chekhov's mature work, in particular "A Singular Occurrence". Machado's literary mapping of Rio reaches back to the St Petersburg of Gogol and Dostoevsky, and anticipates the Dublin of Joyce. Finally, some of his more obviously strange works (nearly all of it is strange to some degree, which is part of its brilliance) evoke Borges and Kafka. Given all this, it's little wonder that writer and critic Kevin Jackson would feel confident enough to claim that Machado "invented literary modernity, sui generis".

As wide-ranging as Machado may be in style, however, there are certain themes he continually returns to. Read enough of Machado's stories in succession and you will soon conclude that the most dominant among these is an obsession with time and its destructive passing. Almost all his stories take pains to establish themselves in the recent or more distant past. "She died in 1859", begins "The Cynosure of All Eyes"; in "Eternal!" the narrator tells us that "the whole incident took place 27 years ago". "I've never been able to understand the conversation I had with a lady, many years ago, when I was 17, and she was 30", begins "Midnight Mass". The story is an exquisite rendering of a failed attempt to recapture time, in this case an unconsummated sexual encounter. In "Mariana", a man is transported into the past while sitting before a portrait of his eponymous ex-lover. In "Dona Paula" an old woman becomes almost vampiric in the way she relives an old affair via her niece, who is engaged in a flirtation with the son of Dona Paula's ex-lover. But when her niece is absent, the older woman cannot recapture her own memories in a way that satisfies her:

But everything … was described with the cold and faded ink of an old chronicle, an empty skeleton of history that lacked a living soul. Everything occurred in her head. Dona Paula tried synchronising her heart and her head to see if she could feel something beyond a mere mental reproduction of her past, but despite all efforts to evoke the old feelings, none returned. Time had swallowed them.

What she is seeking can only be delivered, as Proust would define in Swann's Way 30 years later, by the action of involuntary memory. Her failure is shared by large numbers of Machado's characters, who are continually trying to find routes back into the past. In this way the telling and experiencing of stories – and by extension literature – becomes not a way of interpreting the world, but the world entire. At its most pessimistic, as at the conclusion of "Dona Paula", all pleasure lies in a past that proves impossible to meaningfully access.

This conception of a hollow, unreal present tied to a genuine but obliterated past finds a binary in Machado's interest in the duality of the self, and the exploration of characters whose outer and inner personae differ radically. In "The Diplomat" this idea is expressed through the description of a man's unexpressed passion for a friend's daughter. In "A Famous Man" a hugely successful composer of polkas is wracked by his inability to compose 'serious' music. But it is in an earlier treatment of this theme, 1882's "The Mirror", that Machado captures the phenomenon most memorably. Alone in a desolate plantation house, Jacobina, a sub-lieutenant in the National Guard, finds his reflection growing dimmer and less distinct. The only way to bring it back into focus, and thus cling to reality, is to spend a period several hours each day standing before the mirror in his uniform. Jacobina steps out of this strange, haunting story to take his place alongside Chekhov's Dmitri Gurov and Joyce's Gabriel Conroy, men whose fatally divided selves leave them trapped in a limbo between their public and private personae. Just as the characters belong together, so do their creators; writing about Machado in 2002 Michael Wood complained, "Everyone who reads him thinks he is a master, but who reads him, and who has heard of him?" Not nearly so many as he deserves.

Quotations from the stories are translated by John Gledson, Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu

THE GUARDIAN