Whatever Happened to Brazilian Literature?

Whenever people talk about Latin American literature, most tend to forget about Brazil.  Sometimes it’s because we forget they speak Portuguese in Brazil, not Spanish.  Sometimes it’s because we just don’t know much about South America or their literary traditions.  But what most people don’t know is that translation, especially bad translations, have had quite a bit to do with why we just don’t read a lot of Brazilian lit.  And that’s too bad, because there is a huge wealth of texts from Brazil just waiting for us to read.

Most Brazilians, and scholars, consider Joaquim María Machado de Assis as the country’s best writer.  A native of Rio de Janeiro, he wrote at the turn of the 20^th century.  A great talent, though perhaps not appreciated in his own time, he is now revered the same way the Argentines revere Jorge Luis Borges – as a man ahead of his time, a multifaceted writer and a pre-cursor to postmodernism.  Known for his unreliable narrators and meta-fictional narratives, he’s the kind of author critics and readers tend to fall in love with.  Sometimes compared to Kafka or Lawrence Sterne, Machado has a reputation for genius, if only in the small circles where his works are read (universities, mostly).    

But he’s also the reason we don’t read many Brazilian novels these days.  When someone finally decided to translate his most famous work, Dom Casmurro, into English, they botched the job.  The book is ostensibly a story of a man who thinks his wife is cheating on him.  A simple enough plot.  But the real vision of the novel comes from the way the narrator muses on how one writes, why one writes, and what writing can mean for not just the author, but his audience.  It’s the meta-fiction that makes the novel.  And that’s what the first translation cut out… any chapter or paragraph that pertained to the act of writing was excised.  So when North American reviewers read Machado, they were less than impressed.  This is the best Brazil can do?  Then why translate anything more? 

And so began a long silent streak from Brazil, at least to North American ears.  The publishing bonanza the rest of Latin America enjoyed skipped a vast majority of the continent.  It wasn’t really until publishers discovered Jorge Amado that their eyes turned back to the Brazilian literary scene.  His exotic and melodramatic texts captured the minds of readers and has affected which books and authors are translated.  But if you truly want to read the best Brazil has to offer, look beyond Amado; though his books represent the flare and flavor of Brazil admirably, there is much more to the country than carnival and the tropics. 

My suggestion is to start with Machado de Assis, either Dom Casmurro (there is a newer translation by Helen Caldwell that includes the whole text) or The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas.  Then perhaps try some of the newer, grittier stuff.  My personal favorite is Caio Fernando Abreu’s Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?  Part detective story, part journey of discovery, with lots of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, it’s hauntingly written.  And to truly get a taste of the country, you can always try João Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands.  It’s a bonkers book, a bit like trying to read Joyce, Faulkner, and Pinchon all at the same time – and also nothing like that at all.  A challenge, especially as it was extremely hard to translate, but one worthwhile if you’re up for it (though you may need to find a library copy, as it seems to be harder and harder to find it in print).  

(If you happen to follow the links to these author's wikipedia pages, you'll start to see part of my point.  These are major authors, yet their English wikipedia pages are slight or almost nonexistent.  And it's increasingly harder and harder to get these titles in print.  Which is really too bad - amazing, important books dropping by the way-side because of a seeming lack of interest).

An Apology for Grimdark Fantasy

I’ve been reading Steven Erikson for years, loving every word in his epic, 1,000 paged volumes. I go on binges, reading them on weekends when I don’t have other work, finishing in the wee hours of the morning. I love Brandon Sanderson, too, and even (blasphemy!) think his last few Wheel of Time books are better than RobertJordan’s. It’s the way he writes: the fast-paced sentences, the fragments, the realism. 

It’s like George R.R. Martin or Stephen R. Donaldson or even Stephen King. There’s a feel to their fantasy that makes things immediate. Dangerous. And not just in a blood and guts kind of way (though they definitely bring the gore). It’s the impact of their words, the way the sentences roll together to create images, pictures of things so strange and different yet so real. It’s dark and gothic – the Southern kind, not the British. Why wouldn’t anyone love immersing themselves in these worlds? I know I’m not the only one… just look at how popular Game of Thrones has become.

But it wasn’t until I started following Joe Abercrombie on twitter that I began to hear the word Grimdark and the controversy surrounding it (Abercrombie’s twitter handle is @LordGrimdark). There is a deep divide in the fantasy world – there are those who love this kind of “bankrupt nihilism,” as Leo Grin calls it in his article denouncing the depravity of what he considers anti-fantasy, and there are those who hate it, as Grin and many other Tolkien-ites do. In a nutshell, Grin charges that these novels ignore the pure, poetic, mythic qualities of classic fantasy, eschewing conventional tropes for what he calls “postmodern blasphemies.” Now it may just be me, but his supposed digs just make me want to read this stuff all the more.

Joe Abercrombie wrote a great reply to the kind of poo-pooing Grin and others have posted over the last few years. I won’t go into too much detail here, as his article is definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I will say that it helped me think about why I love this sub-genre so much. It isn’t conventional; it doesn’t always show us what we want to see or give us the plot lines we want to happen. Grimdark is new, not just because of when it was written, but also because of how it reinterprets and reinvigorates older themes and motifs. Grimdark fantasy, just like postmodern literature, takes the tropes we all know, things that have been repeated over and over unto cliché, and makes them new again. The guy in black who wields an axe, rides a nasty, face-chomping stallion, and has a disfiguring facial scar? Not actually the villain. And the guy we’ve been following around, the nice guy with the moral code and the magic blade? The so-called protagonist of our story? He might actually be a complete idiot who gets everyone killed in the end. Or he might die right before the battle, never to complete his story or rescue the girl or kill the dragon. And that’s the point. These novels defy expectations to get at that “deeper meaning” the purists are so hung up about.

And, in truth, that’s what I love most about Grimdark fantasy. Literary modernists despise postmodernism because it doesn’t dig deep – they claim there is no depth to such fiction, only surface. Yet the postmodern gets depth through surface, through quantity as much as quality. And that’s why I think Grimdark fiction makes sense. It’s postmodern in its approach to what came before –all the conventional elves and ogres and disguised princes get new life through recreation. Their stories are new again, reflecting the needs of an audience who’s been there and done that and seen the movie already. 

But what do the rest of you think? Is Grimdark the new wave in fantasy or just a quick blip in the radar? Is it worth reading or a waste of time? And how do such works and their authors fit into the larger debate about grit and its place in literature? How does this fit alongside writers like Cormac McCarthy or Chuck Palahniuk or Bret Easton Ellis?