Brazil has never lacked great literature. But for a long time, it seemed that only the classic Brazilian writers were being published and read in English. You may have heard their names: Machado de Assis, Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, Mário de Andrade, Hilda Hist. These are all phenomenal writers, but the vast majority of Brazilian writers, alive and at work today in Brazil and abroad, have not had their books translated into English, and until as recently as the last few years, they hadn’t been shortlisted for or won any major literary awards outside of the Lusophone sphere.
Luckily, that’s changing. Thanks mostly to the relentless advocacy of BIPOC writers and translators over the last decade, Brazilian literature has finally (albeit slowly) started to achieve new heights, with recent books by Brazilian writers winning the National Book Award, being shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and making several prestigious “best-of” lists, a recognition that is long overdue. What’s also exciting is seeing books by contemporary Black Brazilian writers, queer Brazilian writers, and writers from parts of Brazil that are not as regularly represented even inside Brazil, making the headlines. Here are seven books showcasing the richness of contemporary Brazilian literature.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
Starting with the most formally unusual of the seven books on this list. Ananda Lima’s aptly titled debut collection Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a masterclass in, well, craft; a work of fiction that engages deeply and seriously with literature, film, photography, politics, life and death, all the while not taking itself too seriously. On the contrary: it’s a book that seems to laugh at itself, happy to follow its own dreamy logic. Threading between different countries and worlds, an immigrant writer, inspired by her one-time lover, the Devil, sets out to write an account of her life in the United States. In nine linked stories, she illuminates the mundane aspects of reality–New York City rats, dying plants, subway rides, dirt, workshop critique–as well as the profound, like the threat of deportation, a deadly virus, and the emotional distance from family superimposed upon the geographical one. From its unexpected structure to the philosophical questions it raises, from language that sparkles to settings, even the metaphysical ones (especially the metaphysical ones) that are textured and scented, to characters so flawed and human they expand our perception of humanity, there’s so much joy in Craft.
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
For its small size, this stunning literary debut packs a punch. In a little under 130 pages, we follow a young Brazilian college student in Vermont as she builds a new life abroad, and the attempts, mostly mediated by screens, she and her mother make to keep their strong bond unblemished despite their physical distance. Dantas Lobato’s ingenuity resides in crafting a story that at first seems quiet and slow through her meticulous use of white space, uninterested in adhering to conventional plot expectations, but that under the surface commits instead to an accumulation of movement and feeling that feels far truer to this fragmented mother-and-daughter relationship than any grandiose narrative could. Over hours-long Skype calls, mother and daughter share the shape of their lives on opposite sides of the American Hemisphere: the change of seasons, what they ate for dinner, the dramatic plot of Brazilian soap operas, what clothes to bring on an international trip. The result is a tapestry of distance and intimacy, with all the closeness and discomfort that such a relationship entails. This is the immigrant novel at its tenderest. Dantas Lobato, lauded literary translator and a 2023 National Book Award winner, is working on her own translation of Blue Light Hour to Portuguese, something Lusophone readers can look forward to.
The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato
How many times have we heard the story, which makes it all the more infuriating: a Black man is cruelly murdered at the hands of the police? But we haven’t always read the story this way, certainly not in contemporary Brazilian literature. In blocks of raw and moving prose by Jeferson Tenório, in a translation by Bruna Dantas Lobato that renders the text intimate and ebullient, we follow Pedro, a young architecture student, on his quest to reimagine the life of his dead father Henrique in the aftermath of his brutal killing in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This is an honest, unromanticized account of a beloved and complicated character and his struggles in his personal relationships, his difficulty to reach his public school students and to connect with his son, even his failed attempts to read Dostoyevsky on the bus or wear a black jacket in public, all of which trace back to the racism that pervades every aspect of Black life in Brazil. One of my favorite aspects of this novel is Pedro’s decision not to flinch away from his father’s shortcomings: through’s Pedro’s eulogy, Henrique is able to transcend his status of faceless victim to that of an agent of his own life, tragically cut short, but beautiful and full of music to the last heartbeat. The translator’s note, where Dantas Lobato discusses some of her aesthetic and semantic choices behind her translation, is also an accomplishment.
Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Jr., translated by Johnny Lorenz
This acclaimed novel is the winner of the Jabuti Award, the Oceanus Prize for best international novel, and a finalist for the 2024 International Booker Prize (a first for a Brazilian novelist). Set in the remote Bahia countryside, one of the poorest parts of the Brazilian Northeast, Crooked Plow follows sisters Bibiana and Belonísia after the childhood accident that changes their lives for good, forcing them to a bond that is both corporeal and mythical. Using the sisters’ brutal encounter with their grandmother’s knife as a symbol for the silence and violence that will echo throughout the story, Vieira chronicles the trials and indignities of the community of impoverished farmers the sisters were born into, the majority the descendants of slaves who spend their lives working the land, but have no legal rights to own it. With sharp penmanship and backed by decades of scrupulous research, and in a precise and self-assured translation by Lorenz, Vieira documents the farmers’ plight at the hands of white landowners who abuse, deny, and dispose of them as they see fit, and the perilous consequences for those who try to change their procurement. I so admired this novel’s interest in both magical and social realism, its poetic cadence which has the pull of a trance, and how even the novel’s structure is rich with religious imagery, incorporating stories and characters from the African Diaspora mysticism.
The Head of the Saint by Socorro Acioli, translated by Daniel Hahn
This novel’s synopsis piqued Gabriel García Márquez’ interest so much that he invited Acioli to join his writing workshop in Cuba in 2006, where she wrote the initial seeds of what would eventually grow to be one of the most immersive works of magical realism to be published in Brazil. A young man, down on his luck and on a mission to honor his dead mother’s final wishes, starts living inside the giant hollow head of a saint in a run-down town in the Northeast of Brazil. Right away, he realizes he’s able to hear the townswomen’s prayers when inside the saint’s head, and after scheming with another young man and eventually helping some of these women sort out their love lives, his situation and that of the town transform drastically. These pages are immersed in such an interesting version of Brazil, swept in religiosity and folklore, with peculiar landscape and fauna, rich in vivid imagery and symbolism, and a refreshing regional vernacular that elevates the reading experience. The author of more than twenty books, this is Acioli’s only translation to English so far, but here’s hoping her second novel, which came out in 2023, reaches Anglophone readers soon.
Wait by Gabriela Burnham
Burnham’s second novel, set on Nantucket Island, tells the story of sisters Elise and Sophie over the course of an arduous summer. A few weeks after Elise’s college graduation, she learns that her mother, an undocumented Brazilian immigrant, has been deported to Brazil. With no other family to turn to, Elise and Sophie must support themselves in a corner of the United States where prices are high and resources for the poor and undocumented are few. They are helped by Elise’s affluent college friend, whose support, benign as it might be, also comes with a cost. Down in Brazil, Elise’s mother is eager to be reunited with her daughters and must reckon with a country that no longer feels like home. Written with crystalline prose and from a place of deep empathy, Wait upends common conceptions of Nantucket as an exclusive, wealthy enclave, and reveals that, even on a charming island thirty miles out to sea, working class people must push up against the unjust forces of inequality and discrimination.
The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato
Brazilian writer Stênio Gardel won the 2023 National Book Award in translated literature for this debut novel, the first time a Brazilian author has reached such heights. Raimundo is a 71-year-old illiterate gay man whose queerness was violently suppressed by his parents when he was young, and he decides to sign up for literacy classes late in life so he can finally read the letter his lover, Cícero, had sent him fifty years before. As Raimundo’s grasp on the words increase, memories pour out of him: his moments with Cícero, his years spent doing manual labor and having hidden sexual encounters with men, his own fits of brutality and rage, powered by his decades-long internalized homophobia, and his friend’s suggestion that he learns how to read, which brings about a personal revolution. With vigorous prose and a fragmented, nonlinear narrative, The Words that Remain is a tender book that touches upon themes of closeness and courage, violence and redemption, a heartbreaking novel about queer love and survival.
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