Brazil from the article Literature: Year In Review 2011

Brazil from the article Literature: Year In Review 2011

Brazil

Brazilian publishers brought out several noteworthy books in 2011. One of these, Toupeira: a história do assalto ao Banco Central, by lawyer and former police investigator Roger Franchini, fictionalized the 2005 real-life bank heist of 170 million reais (about $100 million, 70% of which was never recovered) from the Banco Central de Fortaleza, Ceará. The author reviewed trial documents in order to create imaginary dialogues among the thieves. On a different note, writer and editor Nelson de Oliveira published Geração Zero Zero: fricções em rede, an anthology of short stories by 21 young writers who had garnered fame in the first decade of the 21st century and had published at least two books. Oliveira himself was awarded a Cuban Casa de las Américas prize for his 2010 novel Poeira: demônios e maldições, a work of science fiction set in a futuristic city. Antes das primeiras estórias collected for the first time some of the early short stories (1929–30) of João Guimarães Rosa.

In a version of cordel literature (“literature on a string”; the small printed folios of stories, often strung up on a string for sale and sung by their sellers, an art form that was initiated in the 20th century), Moreira de Acopiara’s Colcha de retalhos told the story of the Alvorada family, a tale that paralleled that of the author’s own life. The International Year of African Descent was launched in honour of Brazil’s most widely known and respected novelist, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.

Two notable Brazilian cultural figures, artist and activist Abdias do Nascimento and writer Moacyr Scliar, died in 2011. Among his many other activities, Nascimento in 1944 founded the Black Experimental Theatre in Rio de Janeiro to celebrate Afro-Brazilian culture and to train black actors. During the following 60 years, he became a preeminent defender and promoter of black culture in Brazil through his writings, paintings, and lectures both in Brazil and abroad. He also established Ipeafro, the Rio-based Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute, which remained a vital centre. Also an outsider of sorts, Scliar wrote novels and short fiction that examined through allegories and from a Jewish perspective the questions of Brazilian identity. His book O centauro no jardim (1980; The Centaur in the Garden, 1984), for example, was the tale of Guedali Tratskovsky, born a centaur to his immigrant Russian Jewish parents in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil. In this first work of fiction to confront Jewish immigration to Brazil, Scliar sought to reconcile intimate Jewish life (e.g., eating gefilte fish and observing Shabbat) with the realities of Brazilian street life (e.g., playing football [soccer] and dancing the samba).

Irwin Stern