A member of Brazil’s avant-garde in its heyday. Patricia Galvão (or to use her nickname, Pagu) was extraordinary. Not only was her work among the most exciting and innovative published in the 1930s, it was unique in portraying an avant-garde woman’s view of women in São Paulo during that audacious period. Industrial Park, first published in 1933, is Galvão’s most notable literary achieve-ment. Like Doblin’s portrayal of Berlin in Alexanderplatz or Biely’s St Petersburg, it is a book about the voices, clashes, and traffic of a city in the middle of rapid change. It includes fragments of public documents as well as dialogue and narration, giving a panorama of the city in a sequence of colorful slices. The novel dramatizes the problems of exploitation, poverty, racial prejudice, prostitution, state repression, and neocolonialism, but it is by no means a doctrinaire tract. Galvao’s ironic wit pervades the novel, aspiring not only to describe the teeming city but also to put art and politics in each other’s service. Like many of her contemporaries Galvao was a member of the Brazilian Communist Party. She attracted Party criticism for her unorthodox behavior and outspokenness. A visit to Moscow in 1934 disenchanted her with the communist state, but she continued to militate for change upon returning to Brazil. She was imprisoned and tortured under the Vargas dictatorship between 1935 and 1940. In the 1940s she returned to the public through her journalism and literary activities. She died in 1962. (Source: publisher)

Paperback: 168 pages
Publisher: University of Nebraska (1 Nov. 1993)
Translator: Elizabeth Jackson, K. David Jackson
ISBN-10: 0803270410
ISBN-13: 978-0803270411
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See an interview with Gregory Rabassa conducted by Elizabeth Lowe in 2007 at the annual conference American Literary Translators Association about his translation process – and the impossibility of translation. And below, Gregory Rabassa reads his 1992 Poem ‘This Dream’ on his 92nd birthday party at the Russian Samovar on 52nd St. in NYC.

He was also the author of If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents

According to the jury, however, “the extraordinary quality of his language” and the “poetic power of his prose” made him deserve the prize:

“Through fiction, the author reveals, in the universe of his work, the complexity of human relationships in ways that are hardly accessible to other methods of discourse. This revelation is often rough and uncomfortable, and it is not uncommon for him to address taboo issues. This possibility is made possible by the rigorous use of a language whose plasticity is imprinted in different discursive registers found in a body of work that emphasizes the density instead of length”

Nassar, also one of the 13 finalists in this year’s Man Booker International Prize, has two novels recently translated into English, both in 2016: Ancient Tillage (first published 1975 in Brazilian Portuguese as Lavoura Arcaica) translated by Karen Sotelino, and A Cup of Rage (first published 1978 in Brazilian Portuguese as Um copo de cólera), translated by Stefan Tobler. His third book, short story collection Menina a Caminho (1994) has not been translated yet.

The Camões Prize (currently €100,000) is awarded annually by the Portuguese Fundação Biblioteca Nacional (National Library Foundation) and the Brazilian Departamento Nacional do Livro (National Book Department). This award is considered the premier literary prize for an author in the Portuguese language for the entirety of their work. Ferreira Gullar, Dalton Trevisan, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, and Lygia Fagundes Telles are among past Brazilian winners of the Camões Prize.

I found a copy of Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. at Review, a wonderful independent bookshop in Peckham. They also stocks Raduan Nassar and Lya Luft, but had run out of them – which made me delighted rather than disappointed – and now of Clarice too, as I bought the last copy on display.

Review,
131 Bellenden Rd,
Peckham, SE15 4QY
Wed: 10:00 – 18:00
Thurs: 12:00 – 19:00
Fri-Sat: 10:00 – 18:00
Sun: 11:00 – 17:00

Shortlisted for the 2016 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

‘I often dreamed about the moment of the fall, a silence that lasted a second, possibly two, a room full of sixty people and no one making a sound, as if everyone were waiting for my classmate to cry out … but he lay on the ground with his eyes closed’

A schoolboy prank goes horribly wrong, and a thirteen-year-old boy is left injured. Years later, one of the classmates relives the episode as he tries to come to terms with his demons.

Diary of the Fall is the story of three generations: a man examining the mistakes of his past, and his struggle for forgiveness; a father with Alzheimer’s, for whom recording every memory has become an obsession; and a grandfather who survived Auschwitz, filling notebook after notebook with the false memories of someone desperate to forget.

Michel Laub’s novel asks the most basic – and yet most complex – questions about history and identity, exploring what stories we choose to tell about ourselves and how we become the people we are. (Source: publisher)

Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Harvill Secker (3 April 2014)
Translator: Margaret Jull Costa
ISBN-10: 1846557321
ISBN-13: 978-1846557323
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Hardcover: 225 pages
Publisher: Other Press (NY); Reprint edition (26 Aug. 2014)
Translator: Margaret Jull Costa
ISBN-10: 1590516516
ISBN-13: 978-1590516515
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Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage (16 April 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0099581795
ISBN-13: 978-0099581796
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Shortlisted for the 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

A remarkable novel written by the Brazilian journalist Bernardo Kucinski. K is the story of a father who searches desperately for his daughter, ‘disappeared’ during the military dictatorship in Brazil. The father is himself a refugee from Poland in the 1930s. He is racked by feelings of guilt—that because he was immersed in his Yiddish writing and scholarship, he did not really know his daughter or the danger that threatened her. The novel is based on a true story – the disappearance of Kucinski’s younger sister in 1973. As the author says, ‘Everything in this book is invented but almost everything happened’. The first Brazilian edition sold out in a few weeks, and the novel has been shortlisted for literary awards in Brazil and Portugal. (Source: publisher)

Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Latin America Bureau (29 Jan. 2013)
Translator: Sue Branford
ISBN-10: 189936577X
ISBN-13: 978-1899365777
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In 1850 Rio de Janeiro, Estacio tries to uncover the mysterious past of Helena, his presumed half sister, who has been brought to the family home and with whom he falls in love.

Hardcover: 197 pages
Publisher: University of California Press (1984)
Translator: Helen Caldwell
ISBN-10: 0520048121
ISBN-13: 978-0520048126
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Paperback: 197 pages
Publisher: University of California Press (1987)
Translator: Helen Caldwell
ISBN-10: 0520060253
ISBN-13: 978-0520060258
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The last of Machado de Assis’s novels, published in 1908, the year of his death, Counselor Ayres’ Memorial has been regarded as his swan- song and, given its melancholic tone, his ‘reconciliation with life’. In fact it is much more interesting than that. Its central character is Counselor Ayres, a Brazilian diplomat who has retired to Rio de Janeiro after many years abroad. The novel purports to be his diary for the period between January 1888 and August 1889: in fact, it soon becomes plain to the reader that it also tells a story, centred on an old married, and childless couple, Aguiar and Dona Carmo, and two young people, now in their twenties, the widow Fidélia and Tristão, in whom they have taken an intense interest. Fidélia’s marriage was happy, but brief: she also braved the anger of her father, the plantation owner Baron of Santa Pia, to marry the son of a traditional enemy of his. Her husband died in Lisbon, and she has gone into permanent mourning, swearing never to marry again; in the two years since his death, she has visited his grave daily. Tristão is the son of friends of Aguiar and Dona Carmo, and was virtually adopted by them as a child; later, rather than go into his father’s business, he decides to get a lawyer’s degree and finally to go to Europe with his parents. (This is an excerpt of a review by John Gledson, at Babel Guide to Brazilian Fiction, Boulevard Books, 2001)

Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers (Mar. 1990)
Translated as: The Wager: Aires’ Journal
Translator: R.L. Scott-Buccleuch
ISBN-10: 0720607728
ISBN-13: 978-0720607727
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Hardcover: 205 pages
Publisher: University of California Press (1 July 1992)
Translated as: Counselor Ayres’ Memorial
Translator: Helen Caldwell
ISBN-10: 0520022270
ISBN-13: 978-0520022270
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Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: University of California Press (1 July 1992)
Translated as: Counselor Ayres’ Memorial
Translator: Helen Caldwell
ISBN-10: 0520047753
ISBN-13: 978-0520047754
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Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Peter Owen; New Ed edition (1 July 2005)
Translated as: The Wager: Aires’ Journal
Translator: R.L. Scott-Buccleuch
ISBN-10: 0720612306
ISBN-13: 978-0720612301
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Strolling through Bloomsbury yesterday, after attending great events at the Festival of Culture, I popped in Skoob, a second hand bookshop at The Brunswick, and was pleased to find some “Machados”. They had at least Helena, Epitaph of a Small Winner, and The Wager, which you can see in the top photo. I love finding Brazilian books in second hand shops and really need to hold myself back to resist the temptation of buying all of them! As I arrived with only 10 minutes to the closing time, I could not explore the wonderful collection further. I guess there will be other treasures of Brazilian literature, not only by Machado de Assis.

Skoob is a temple for secondhand books (according to Time Out), with a selection of 55,000 uncatalogued works  cover almost every subject imaginable to rummage through.

Skoob Books,
66, The Brunswick,
Marchmont St,
London WC1N 1AE
10.30am-8pm Mon-Sat; 10.30am-6pm Sun

Ranked alongside leading Latin American writers like César Aira and Mario Bellatín—and deeply influenced by Clarice Lispector—João Gilberto Noll is esteemed as one of Brazil’s living legends.

Quiet Creature on the Corner marks Noll’s English-language debut. An unemployed poet finds himself thrown in jail after inexplicably raping his neighbor, but his time in the slammer is mysteriously cut short when he’s abruptly taken to a new home—a countryside manor where his every need seen to. All that’s required of him is to . . . write poetry. Just who are his captors, Kurt and Otávio? What of the alluring maid, Amália, and her charge, a woman with cancer named Gerda? And, most alarmingly of all, why does Kurt suddenly appear to be aging so much faster than he should?

Reminiscent of the films of David Lynch, and written in Noll’s distinctive postmodern style—a strange world of surfaces seemingly without rational cause and effect—Quiet Creature on the Corner is a bizarre existential mystery with deep implications. Written during Brazil’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy—and capturing the disjointed feel of that rapidly changing world—Quiet Creature is mysterious and abrupt, pivoting on choices that feel both arbitrary and inevitable. Like Kazuo Ishiguro, Noll takes us deep into the mind of person who’s always missing a few crucial pieces of information. Is he moving toward an answer, or is he just as lost as ever? (Source: publisher)

Paperback: 120 pages
Publisher: Two Lines Press; Tra edition (May 10, 2016)
Translator: Adam Morris
ISBN-10: 1931883513
ISBN-13: 978-1931883511
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