Brazilian Literature Series – serie

Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions "a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera." Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. Joao Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.

Majnun lives his life online in his grandparents’ well-appointed home in the Brazilian capital. No school, no work—just bored in Brasília. After falling in love with a married woman, however, he flees to Madrid with friends, intent on, well … something. Writing a historical novel about medieval Spain? Or perhaps converting to Islam and heading to North Africa? As Majnun floats through the crowds of Catholics, through encounters with legitimate medievalists, through romances, friendships, mosques, and palaces, his vague interests threaten to boil over into violent, even deadly action.

The Lady of Solitude projects a fresh and daring new voice on to the Brazilian literary scene. These transgressive and highly charged erotic stories are all written from a woman’s point of view and they offer an unexpected perspective on the world, sex and desire in a changing Brazilian and global context. That is not to say that all of Parisot’s characters are strong, emancipated and resolute: they just live in a world where relationships of all kinds have changed. Avowedly a disciple of the famous detective writer Rubem Fonseca, Paula Parisot adds a new and sinister twist to crimes of passion in the big city. Some of the settings are familiar to Fonseca fans: high society salons, favelas, back alleys, and hotels in European capitals. Alternating the register from interior monologue to letters and omniscient narration, Parisot brings to the surface intimate moments as well as exact instants when certain social conventions change, move on or die.

Saga of Brutes draws together three confronting and darkly stories: “Between Dog Fights and Pig Slaughter,” “The Dirty Work of Others,” and “carbo animalis,” published in one volume for the first time. Ana Paula Maia’s no-holds-barred narrative pulls few punches, describing the shocking reality of the lives of the invisible workingmen who, like Atlas, are forced to carry society’s burdens. These heroes of vile circumstance—coal miners, firemen, garbage collectors, crematorium workers—are the soot-covered supermen who risk their lives performing difficult and dangerous work for others. But in the end, they, too, amount to nothing but carbo animalis—notwithstanding the impure relation of coal to diamonds. Despite their straightforwardness, Ana Paula Maia’s stories are filled with great insight and compassion for the lives of the men who live on the edge of a society built with their own sweat.