Nathan Walters asks why so few foreigners recently have chosen to capture Brazil in letters, and takes us through the rare exceptions that open up the country to international readers. Above, the cover of a recently published book by From Brazil contributor James Young.

Nathan Walters

So much of Brazil’s literary treasures remain locked in the Portuguese language, which is a shame for the world. Though some of the country’s iconic authors, like Clarice Lispector, Machado de Assis, Paulo Coelho and Jorge Armado, have been competently translated, so much remains reserved for those at or nearing fluency.

No translation can compare with work in the original language, and that’s most definitely the case with Brazilian Portuguese. Brazilians love wordplay, and their language is full of idiomatic expressions that are largely untranslatable. Brazilian novels that rely heavily on slang might be pure poetry in the native tongue, but tend to fall flat when translated to another (Paulo Lins’ City of God is one example). The situation can be frustrating for foreigners who want to learn more about Brazilian culture.

Though quality nonfiction works about the country by foreign writers are easy to find (Joseph Page’s The Brazilians, Michael Reid’s Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power, and Larry Rohter’s Brazil on the Rise stand out), fiction works by foreign authors that tap into the seemingly endless possibilities Brazil offers remain rare.

We have to ask why. Because to anyone with even the slightest inclination to write, Brazil is a paradise.

The streets in the major cities, like Rio and São Paulo, are littered with spectacular histories. And the vast interior, replete with realities that would make Zola blush, remains largely untouched by the imaginative storytelling of foreigners.

The country’s history is sprinkled with some amazing stories of foreign writers that have made a splash here. Austrian Stefan Zweig’s Brazil, Land of the Future may best be remembered for its misappropriation: “Brazil, land of the future…and it always will be.” Hungarian Paulo Rónai fell madly in love with the country and the language in the early 20^th century. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss spent months trekking through the unwieldy Amazon. Hunter S. Thompson used to work with his Olympia SF typewriter out on Copacabana beach.

Yet, few Anglophone writers enjoy the prestige reserved for American poet Elizabeth Bishop. While Bishop’s autobiographical poetry manages to capture the complex feelings of a foreigner’s life in Brazil, the form leaves fans of literary prose wanting.

In the early 1990s, American novelist John Updike spent time in the country for his novel Brazil. Though considered a bit cliché, the work remains one of the few where a foreign author takes on the intricacies of the whole country, the regional idiosyncrasies, and the social issues that continue dominate public discourse. Imaginative, well written, sexualized (it’s Updike), the novel remains a notable work of fiction dealing with the splendor and anguish of life in Brazil.

Brazil was published in 1994 and in the twenty years since, Brazil has opened its doors to foreigners, who now pour into the country in droves. Yet, the flow of fictional works from expat writers has failed to keep pace.

There are many explanations for this. For one, weaving a story into the complexities of Brazil is no easy task for foreigners who are still doing their best to understand the country.

Sarah de Sainte Croix, an English writer living in Rio for the past four years, has organized a writers group in Rio (Rio Writers’ Forum), one of the few support networks for foreign writers in the country, where foreign and native writers gather to share their experiences and work during weekly sessions.

“One difficulty we have talked about in the group is not knowing where to set our stories. As we are mostly foreigners, it can feel like we are impostors if we write Brazilian stories, and yet many of us feel quite detached from our countries of origin and the details of everyday life there,” she says. “One solution for our Brazilian stories is to create ‘foreign’ characters to tell them. The other is to simply bluster ahead and invent, despite our insecurities, and in the name of fiction. Which is actually quite a good metaphor for moving to another country when you think about it, because most of the time it feels like you’re living inside a big, unwieldy story, with surprises around every corner, making it all up as you go along.”

Author James Young, author of A Beer Before Lunch, a collection of stories set in Recife, as well as From Brazil contributor, has been writing in Brazil for years, but still faces the challenges most expat writers deal with.

“I think there are two challenges for an expat writer living in Brazil. One is the need to be original and avoid stereotype and cliché,” Young says. “I think there’s a cycle to most expat lives here—the initial giddy honeymoon phase, the plateau that comes when real life kicks in, the discontent as frustrations seem to outweigh benefits, and then hopefully, a return to the plateau and a realization that there are good and bad things about life anywhere. No one should ever write anything during the giddy honeymoon phase!”

Another problem is the fact prose fiction has taken a backseat to other forms of enjoyment (Why read a novel when you can watch a video of a dancing cat?).

James Scudamore, the British author of the 2009 novel Heliopolis, has won accolades for his story of life in modern São Paulo, but to finish the novel (one of three by the author) he had to face down the same obstacles every writer faces.

“The usual ones, especially persuading myself to keep on doing it in the face of my own laziness and the basic indifference of much of society towards prose fiction. But once the urge to do it has been implanted, you can’t ignore it. Or rather it won’t ignore you. It’s a compulsion.”

For Scudamore, the urge to write about the concrete jungle that is contemporary São Paulo was implanted as a child during a temporary residency in the city, one of many homes during a childhood shuttling around the globe.

“I think the idea that I might try to write fiction probably first came to me when living in Brazil. It’s certainly the earliest memory I have of trying to write stories. Something about piranhas, when I was 9. But I think more widely the fact of having been moved around so much as a kid was a key driving factor: abrupt rupture and profound change are often to be found in the childhoods of those who end up writing fiction. It leaves you with a sort of ‘yearning energy’- an urge to recreate in prose the places you are missing in real life. The act of missing things becomes an act of invention.”

For those inclined to face down the challenges, Brazil is fertile ground for fictional creations.

“Brazil is a tremendously evocative country, entirely removed from drizzly Belfast where I was born. It provides a vivid backdrop to any story—whether it’s the light, the smells, the sounds or the people,” says Young. “Moving to a country like Brazil can be an almost hallucinogenic experience—it allowed me to escape the confines of my other life and look at things in a fresh way.”

For some expats, writing in Portuguese for a Brazilian audience is now more interesting than weaving stories in their native language.

American writer Julia Michaels, perhaps the most well-known gringa blogger in Brazil, has lived in the country for more than thirty years. After a few attempts at writing a novel, Michaels says she gave up to focus on other writing projects.

Her 2013 memoir Solteira no Rio de Janeiro was well received by Brazilian audiences, but the English edition is still in the works.

“I’m lucky to be able to write in Portuguese and direct myself to Brazilians, this is a great relief. Otherwise I would be very frustrated because books don’t sell. It’s a tough career!”

Pelas Entreviagens, the 2014 travelogue from New Orleans transplant Heyesiof Epwe’ru is an account of the writer’s time working as a translator in Bahia. So much of Epwe’ru’s story, the expressions, places, commands the Portuguese language, so why fight it?

Perhaps not surprisingly considering the attention given by local writers, many stories set in the country explore the two major themes that dominate the outside world’s vision of Brazil: violence and inequality.

“Rather sadly, the one narrative strand that underlies much of my work, and pops up again and again, involves the poverty, violence and tragedy that results from the inequality that so scars the country,” says Young. Echoing the sentiment of other expat writers. “Such inequality exists everywhere of course, but not on the scale that it does here. The size of everything in Brazil—the country itself, the cities, the crime rates, the incredible numbers of people—feed my imagination.”

If you care about literature and/or Brazil , pay attention to FLIP this July – Dom Phillips

The Paraty International Literary Party (Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty), or FLIP, as Brazil’s biggest literary festival is known, announced its 2013 lineup in Rio last Thursday.

Palestinian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti and French novelist Michel Houellebecq are among the star turns. As is the former Brazilian culture minister and elder statesman of Brazilian music, Gilberto Gil (above), who will both perform at the opening show and debate a sociologist (though not, sadly, at the same time). Brit Geoff Dyer, American short story specialist/International Man Booker winner Lydia Davis and Brazilian singer Maria Bethânia also appear, though it could be argued the real attractions are the cobblestone charms and lush tropical coastline setting of Paraty itself. July 3-7. FLIP website in English

By Claire Rigby

As the Flip literary festival recedes into the past and the São Paulo Book Bienal approaches, last week’s series of post-Flip events included a gathering in São Paulo to celebrate the launch of the new Granta anthology of Brazilian writing. Published by Alfaguara, the local licensee of the British literary magazine, the collection of short stories and excerpts from forthcoming novels features the work of twenty promising new writing talents, born since 1972. Or as the book’s title puts it, The Best Young Brazilian Writers (Os Melhores Jovens Escritores Brasileiros). And with that blunt ‘Best’, and no qualifying ‘of’, the polemics commenced.

The keyboards of literary journalists, bloggers and tweeters clattered into action, and an Off-Granta blog was launched to host the submissions that didn’t make it into the collection (Granta received 247 in total). Granta’s UK editor, the American John Freeman, in Brazil for Flip and for a series of engagements in Rio and São Paulo, found himself questioned repeatedly about the title, the selection and the selection process. At Flip and at later events, Freeman was unruffled by queries about the wisdom of Granta’s calling these twenty writers ‘the best’, good-naturedly pointing out that anyone has the right to state that something is the best, and everyone has the right to beg to differ.

Raquel Cozer’s books blog here at Folha, A Biblioteca de Raquel, has hosted much of the debate in the comments section; and in a memorable post on his blog, Uma Confraria de Tolos, the critic André Barcinski threw in a little perspective: ‘Hardly anyone has read it, but the collection … has already provided a lot to discuss. “A lot to discuss” might be a bit of an exaggeration: like everything to do with literature in Brazil, it has been the subject of intense debate by 13 or 14 people on Twitter, and at the odd table in [Rio’s] Baixo Leblon, or at [São Paulo’s] Mercearia São Pedro.’

Referring to the latter, a bar favoured by journalists, novelists, culture vultures and wannabe creatives in the neighbourhood of Vila Madalena, Barcinski observes, ‘If a runaway lorry crashed into Mercearia São Pedro as it was rounding the curve, it would take out half of that new generation of writers, and about 70% of its readership.’

Literary lineup

Granta, meanwhile, is accustomed to the occasional hoo-ha: you can’t make omelettes like its decades-long series Best of New British Novelists without breaking a few eggs, and there has been the odd small, polite scuffle before in the wake of its anthologies, mainly based around this or that writer’s eligibility. But beginning with its first Best of British anthology in 1983, Granta prides itself on having included future literary stars of the likes of Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith in its top twenties – although Brazilian novelists wounded at being omitted might comfort themselves with the many ‘best of’ authors of whom little has been heard since.

Curiously, the British and American anthologies do include a mitigating ‘of‘ in their titles – Best of Young British Novelists – which may suggest that it was the Brazilian editors who decided to leave the book preposition-free in Portuguese. Consciously? Thoughtlessly? We don’t know.

Either way, with the stories in the process of being translated into English for release in the UK in November, followed by editions in Spanish and Chinese next year, and possible versions in German, Finnish and Hebrew (Granta has branched out into international licensing operations in all those languages and more in recent years), the most interesting upshot of the anthology has been to bring new Brazilian fiction into the spotlight.

Fictional heroes

So what does new Brazilian fiction look like? If this anthology is anything to go by, it’s thoughtful and cerebral, given to memory and to the confessional. It’s keen on the first-person, and often semi-autobiographical. It’s controlled, careful and polished. It’s serious rather than comic or satirical. And it’s predominantly white and middle class, concentrated in the prosperous south of this almighty country. Most of the twenty writers are from the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul, and many are journalists, some even literary editors. ‘No surprises there,’ reads part of a delightfully bitchy blog post, ‘E Lendo a Lista da Granta‘, from one author, Santiago Nazarian, who didn’t make it into the book. ‘They’re all academics, all heteros, dressed like writers. That’s important: to APPEAR to be a good writer.’

So literature favours voices from society’s culturally and economically hegemonic, well educated classes. So what’s new. Speaking compellingly at Granta’s British Council-sponsored event during Flip, the British–Caribbean writer Andrea Stuart, a contributor to Granta’s most recent UK magazine issue, made the same observation of Britain’s literary and cultural scene, zooming in to detect establishment blind spots regarding the lives of many of London’s people. ‘When Britain is being sold abroad, so much of London life is completely excluded,’ she said, in a discussion with Freeman and the Welsh writer Cynan Jones. ‘I’m interested in updating its narrative, making it interesting and complex rather than contiguous with a long, unworkable story of the past.’

Cosmolândia

As these twenty stories roll out into the world to represent Brazilian literature, as they must whether they like it or not, with Granta’s gravitas behind them, one of the most noticeable aspects of the selection is the 21st-century, flattened-out internationality of many of the texts. (I’ve read a quarter of the stories, and read parts of most of the others in the course of writing this post.) Antonio Prata’s beautifully written tale of social mobility and its attendant childhood oneupmanship, triggered by a remote-controlled car, could be taking place in almost any suburb anywhere in the Western hemisphere. Luisa Geisler’s stressed-out business traveller protagonist hurries, fretting, to meetings and flights via a series of anytown escalators. In other stories, characters think back to Paris, London, Montreal; and Michel Laub’s engaging chronicle of dead pets and memory slips backwards and forwards in time easily against a backdrop of Porto Alegre and of São Paulo’s Rua Augusta; but it, too, might be a tale being told in any city.

None of the stories are less enjoyable or well written for it, but you wonder how they’ll read in all these other languages: in Chinese. As readers, are we content with great writing from our foreign literature, or do we crave exoticism? The story by Cristhiano Aguiar, a writer from Paraíba in Brazil’s vast North East, has a little more of it than most, and the two stories in the anthology set in Rio de Janeiro are drenched in the stuff, notably in Tatiana Salem Levy’s gorgeous account of a return to Rio from years in Lisbon, where Rio is thick with heat and sweat, the summer, the sea and a delicious sort of tropical melancholy.

But all of the stories, if only the translations manage to preserve some of it, gleam with the rounded, corpulent beauty of Brazilian Portuguese. As Ian McEwan observed, spot on, during his debate with Jennifer Egan at Flip, it’s ‘nasal and liquid at the same time, like a very full-bodied red wine being poured’. And there’s a lot of it about. This anthology is just one of a series of anthologies recently launched (see below), and further developments await Brazilian writing in the world – Brazilophilia has spread to publishing, too, with next year’s Frankfurt Book Fair featuring Brazil as the spotlight country. Saúde.

Other recent anthologies of Brazilian literature

• Geração Zero Zero: Fricções em rede (Generation Zero Zero: Network frictions), collected by Nelson de Oliveira. In Portuguese.
• Geração subzero: 20 autores congelados pela crítica, mas adorados pelos leitores (Generation Subzero: Twenty authors frozen out by critics, but adored by readers), edited by Felipe Pena. In Portuguese

Photo above: Some of the 20 ‘best’ at the launch party at FLIP

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By Dom Phillips

Wobbling atop a stand-up paddle board may not be the most conventional way to view a literary festival. But it’s certainly the most scenic. I attempted to paddle genteelly, determinedly banishing mortifying images of me toppling into the river as we headed down the river beside which FLIP – the International Paraty Literature (Festival Literária Internacional de Paraty) – is staged.

My host Michael Smyth, an adventure tour guide in this beautiful, costal town of Paraty where FLIP is staged would argue that boats and beaches are what most people come here for. Apart from the 25,000 FLIP had brought in for its annual five-day festival, which ended Sunday.

He’d tricked me into taking an alternative route up a river on our Sunday afternoon stand-up paddle trip, and suddenly we were heading past the festival’s riverside marquee, cafes and bookshops and out to sea, in front of thousands of erudite Brazilian literary buffs, hanging out in the sun with their cameras, and suddenly brightening at the sight of two skinny, aging gringos in grubby lycra T-shirts and swimming trunks, grimly paddling towards them.

Paraty is the sort of bucolic Brazilian beach town for which words like ‘picturesque’, ‘colonial’, ‘charming’ and ‘ambling’ could have been invented. But it buzzes with life, ideas and conversation for FLIP when writers are the stars and Brazilian names like Luís Fernando Veríssimo get stopped on the street for photographs. It’s awfully civilized and more than a little posh, but it’s also a lot of fun.

And by Sunday, the last of FLIP’s five days, I’d seen it from every other angle bar the stand-up paddle board, so what the hell. I’d seen it from inside the main authors’ tent, with a couple of thousand literary buffs chuckling at the wry witticisms of English novelist Ian McEwan, or the acute observations on the nature of family from Portuguese writer Dulce Maria Cardoso – a star of new-generation Portuguese literature.

From outside on the grass by the port, watching men in medieval costume on stilts perform an inexplicable theatrical routine. And from the town’s main square, where the words of great Brazilian writer Carlos Drummond de Andrade were being projected onto the side of an old church, along with photos and his old identity cards, while a group played chorinho, the sweetly melancholy pre-samba music and a crowd around them smiled, swayed and sang along.

There were films, art exhibitions, shows and children’s events spread around the town. But the real action was in the authors’ tent, where during mesas, or ‘tables’, in TV chat show style, a mediator tries to get writers to open up and spill their deepest creative secrets. Novelists by nature not being the most exhibitionist of creatures, this can be a hit and miss affair. A little like balancing on a stand-up paddle board.

But the mesas also fill your head with the ideas, revelations and the words of extremely clever and interesting people who spend their lives inventing other worlds for a living, which can frequently be a richly rewarding experience. As John Freeman, editor of British literary magazine Granta, in town to launch its first collection of New Young Brazilian Writers, observed: “Here the ideas are the entertainment.” FLIP, in short, is for anyone who loves books. “The bookstore is insane,” Freeman added. “It’s like a beehive.”

For instance American novelist Jonathan Franzen revealed during his session that for him, writing was the mental equivalent of the Greek Myth of Prometheus (you remember, Prometheus is chained to a rock while an eagle eats his liver on a daily basis). But Franzen also flummoxed both mediator and audience with his endless pauses and oblique flights of imaginative fancy.

Asked about how characters dealt with freedom in his books, Franzen awwwwed for an awfully long time then observed that there were many different types of freedom. For instance, a visitor to American department store Bed Bathroom & Beyond would find so many varieties of shower curtain it would be impossible to settle on one. That’s a kind of freedom too. I thought he was hilarious, honest and profound. But many complained afterwards that he was chatíssimo – dull as death.

This is perhaps where FLIP’s laudable internationalism ran aground. Heard delivered laconically in English, in Franzen’s dry mid-West tones, the shower curtain thing is funny. But Anglo-Saxon irony does not translate well to Portuguese – trust me, I’ve researched this thoroughly on innumerable disastrous dinner dates with Brazilian women. It just sounds rude or, worse, irreverent. And Brazil is a conservative society where great writers and a sort of esoteric intellectualism are revered, and pithy irreverent jokes are not.

As was illustrated last year when a young Brazilian woman complained to me after a mesa by American novelist James Ellroy. Ellroy had got a laugh when he said he had never read the great Russian novelists like Tolstoy and shrugged. Like, so what? How dare he joke about not having read the greats? That, essentially, was her beef. He’s James Ellroy, he can say whatever he likes, was my reply. It didn’t go down very well either.

Brit Ian McEwan and American Jennifer Egan, who were on together, did go down well though: they were funny, honest and intelligent. Charming. Humble. And they avoided long pauses. The crowd gave them a standing ovation afterwards.

A mesa with Dulce Maria Cardoso and Brazilian writers João Anzenello Carrascoza and Zuenir Ventura began slowly, but finished with a bang when Ventura read out a passage from his new book in which a shocked child inadvertently stumbles in on his aunt having sex in a pharmacy. Sex. Now there’s one subject all Brazilians love to have a good laugh about – even the posh, intellectual ones.

As well as, obviously, the site of two bony, graying foreigners edging past them on the river, heading out to the sea, precariously balanced on two stand-up paddle boards, eyes fixed firmly to the front, like models on a catwalk. Pleading silently with every God in the universe: ‘Please, please, please don’t let me fall off…’

The Gods answered my prayers. We did not fall off, and headed serenely out to sea and out of sight. Only problem is now I have to spend the rest of eternity chained to a rock while an eagle eats my liver on a daily basis.

(Note to Brazilian readers, that’s a joke. Seriously, I love Greek mythology, I’ve read all of them… I just can’t remember the names right now, cause I’m balanced on a stand-up paddle board.)