LRB on Rubem Fonseca

[Keith Davis]

Thank you for sharing this.

Www.keithdavismusic.com

> On Apr 22, 2020, at 10:41 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> If you want to write about violence – if you want to tell it like it
> is – then you’re advised to keep it plain. We’re conditioned to think
> that real horror should be described as succinctly as possible, since
> superfluous words only distract from the act itself. Words are so
> often digressive that inserting them where they’re not wanted can be
> seen as evidence of a lack of moral seriousness, a bourgeois leavening
> of what can’t be stomached. Accounts of violence, in fiction and in
> life, tend to the flat, the controlled, the unflinching. Crime novels
> and police reports and news bulletins have their conventions too, and
> they all borrow their rhetoric from each other: the who, where, when,
> what; the calibre of the weapon and the dimensions of the wound. They
> make up for the slipperiness of words with a superabundance of detail.
> In these respects, the documentary idiom is very close to lying:
> terseness is a strategy to avoid inadvertently saying what might not
> seem true, and a barrage of facts makes a story difficult to contest.
> But then liars and reporters both have a vested interest in making
> their account believable.
> 
> In Brazil, which since the 1970s has seen more urban violence than any
> other country in the world, no writer has dealt with the subject more
> plainly than Rubem Fonseca. In 1976 his bestselling short story
> collection Feliz Ano Novo (‘Happy New Year’) was censored by a court
> acting for the military government. Five of the stories were banned,
> and the ban on the title story wasn’t revoked until 1989. ‘Feliz Ano
> Novo’ describes an attack on a houseful of rich, white New Year’s Eve
> revellers by three armed slum-dwellers. One woman is raped and
> strangled. Shit is smeared on bedsheets. The narrator tries to get the
> ring off a dead woman’s finger but it won’t budge so he bites off the
> finger and throws the whole thing into a sack. A man who tries to
> negotiate is made to stand with his back to a wall, a little distance
> away from it, so that the blast from the shotgun lifts him off his
> feet and sends him smack against the plaster. The effect isn’t quite
> what the killers hoped for, so they get another man to stand against a
> door: this time, the body is satisfyingly pinned to the woodwork by
> the lead of the shot, before sliding slowly to the floor. It’s a form
> of experimentation.
> 
> The judges in the censorship case argued that the story might lead the
> average Brazilian astray. That would be a wholly ludicrous statement
> if applied to a piece of fiction written, say, in France, but ‘Feliz
> Ano Novo’ is precisely about what it claims is the average Brazilian;
> and it’s this claim that’s subversive, not the violence. The
> protagonists are ‘fucked and underpaid’, like everybody else they come
> across, apart from the super-wealthy whose party they’ve crashed. What
> makes them angry is how trivial the partygoers’ possessions are to
> them: ‘The drinks, the food, the jewels, the money, all that was just
> crumbs to them. They had lots more in the bank. To them we were
> nothing more than three flies in the sugar bowl.’ And what’s on their
> mind is what they don’t have. As convention demands, the story appears
> to be very precise in its arsenal of weapons-related terminology –
> they’re using a 12-gauge Thompson – and equally interested in its
> details, but when you look closely at the way those details are
> described you find that the language keeps heading in a particular
> direction: ‘There was a hole in his chest that was big enough for a
> loaf of bread.’ ‘Bread’, ‘sugar’, ‘crumbs’: this is a story about
> food, not blood. The people are starving, and what riled the censors
> was their hunger.
> 
> Fonseca’s stories – which are what made his reputation in Brazil –
> haven’t until now been collected in English translation. Most of the
> entries in ‘The Taker’ and Other Stories, a selection from Feliz Ano
> Novo and his 1979 collection, O Cobrador, are nasty, brutish, short.
> But they all play tricks with the form, and they’re never quite what
> they seem. ‘Account of the Incident’ appears, at first, to be just
> what its title suggests: a sober, factual report – of a traffic
> accident. The specifics are recorded in full: the where (‘the bridge
> over the Coroado River, at marker 53, in the direction of Rio de
> Janeiro’); the what (‘a passenger bus of the Unica Auto Onibus firm,
> licence plates RF-80-07-83 and JR-81-12-27’); the who. Five people
> have been killed, and their bodies recovered from the river; their
> names are listed – where they can be known – along with their ages and
> marital status. It’s all very dry and routine, as if lifted from the
> pages of a policeman’s notebook.
> 
> The only thing that makes the collision more than ordinary is the fact
> that what the bus hit was a brown cow. Now, cows are intrinsically
> absurd, especially when they’re brown, but the cow is only the
> beginning. The accident was witnessed by ‘Elias Gentil dos Santos and
> his wife Lucília, residents in the vicinity’. Elias asks Lucília to
> run home and fetch a knife. Then Marcílio da Cunceição turns up, along
> with Ivonildo de Moura Júnior. They’re all eyeing each other
> suspiciously, and eyeing the dead cow. Elias jumps first, and starts
> carving up the carcass, by which point Ivonildo’s mother-in-law
> Aurélia has appeared, as have Erandir Medrado and his brother
> Valfrido, and they’re all hopping around trying to get in on the
> action. Sacks are brought, along with various sharp implements and, as
> soon as local dignitaries start muscling in to demand their piece of
> meat, we know that things have taken a Gogol-like turn. There’s
> nothing left of the cow and, with this crazed escalation, the
> ‘account’ has become a fable. All the specificity with which the story
> opens turns out to have been only a blind, a smokescreen: while an act
> of prestidigitation keeps the eyes of the reportorial world on the
> calamitous bus, the real action is taking place elsewhere, on the
> bridge itself, where a cow is being chopped up by a succession of
> loons. The truth isn’t in the facts, it’s in the fantasy.
> 
> Fonseca, who is now 83, has been one of those famously reticent
> writers – he’s a friend of Thomas Pynchon – who chooses to say as
> little as he can about what his fiction is meant to mean. One of the
> distractions his biography throws up is that he worked for the Rio
> police in the 1950s and 1960s: this is supposed to give him a licence
> to write about violence, as if what he’s giving us is the documentary
> dope, the news from the street. He doesn’t exactly dispel the
> illusion. But the writing itself displays a suspicion of reported
> fact. ‘The Taker’, which was inexplicably not banned by the censors,
> relates the escalating exploits of a serial killer with an axe to
> grind (or more precisely a machete, which he sharpens on a ‘special
> stone’). As the Taker rapes and shoots his way through the streets of
> Rio, there’s a distinct background hum from the media at large, which
> distorts his actions and makes them loud. In the story’s logic, no one
> notices the disappearance of yet another suburban banker until it’s
> seen to be part of a pattern. ‘No More Safety in the Streets’: it’s
> not until he dispatches a couple with serious connections that the
> ‘society columnists’ sit up and take note. He is known in the papers
> as ‘o louco da Magnum’, or, in Clifford Landers’s clever rendering,
> ‘the Magnum maniac’. (Sometimes something is added in translation.)
> But the papers he avidly reads don’t reflect what is revealed by his
> first-person narration: he’s a poet, too, and he has a lot to give.
> 
> The Taker likes to share his verses with his potential victims. It
> isn’t all good – ‘It wasn’t God or the Devil/who made me an avenger/it
> was I myself/I am the Penis-Man/I am the Taker’ – and not everybody
> knows how to respond to it. (‘Do you like movies?’ one nervous woman
> interrupts him to ask.) But the poetry, which runs all the way through
> the story, is a counterweight to those murmuring radios that
> continuously babble about a madman on the loose: it’s an alternative
> account, and it has its own narrative. It’s not only a self-justifying
> means of expression for a man who has no other outlet, whose real
> voice nobody otherwise will ever hear; it also has a notional
> addressee: the rich, the fat, the smug. And it isn’t quite as
> ingenuous as it sounds. As it builds to a climax, it comes over all
> literary. ‘Eat caviar/your day is coming,’ he warns the soon to be
> dead, in a curious echo of the Mayakovksy slogan that the sailors are
> said to have chanted as they stormed the Winter Palace: ‘Eat
> pineapples, chew on partridge/your last day is coming, bourgeois!’ It
> rhymes in Russian, as a strict translation presumably can’t be made to
> in any other language, which is why the Taker’s version – ‘Come
> caviar/ teu dia vai chegar’ – is so euphoniously cunning.
> 
> Fonseca’s short stories bury their literary references, in contrast to
> his novels, which parade their learning through a heady mix of high
> art and low. The 1998 Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos, for
> instance (published in Britain as The Lost Manuscript), is a thriller
> about diamond smugglers and carnival artistes that is narrated by a
> filmmaker obsessed with Isaac Babel. The stories’ subtlety with their
> sources allows them, unlike the novels, to be read as pure noir
> entertainment: ‘Night Drive’, in Landers’s translation, was first
> published in Ellery Queen’s Prime Crimes 5. It’s one of Fonseca’s
> simplest stories, and it’s only two pages long, but even here a great
> deal is happening. It purports to describe the nocturnal activities of
> a wealthy office worker who, it turns out, likes to take his swanky
> car for a spin after dinner, using his impressive driving skills to
> run down and kill random pedestrians.
> 
> ‘Night Drive’ is a comedy. It begins with the man arriving home after
> a hard day at work, ‘my briefcase bulging with papers, reports,
> studies, research, proposals, contracts’. There’s a pleasing note of
> self-importance to this list: bigwig that he is, he recognises the
> attitude he ought to have to all the significant stuff he has to do.
> He’s a character already. But since paperwork isn’t really what
> interests him, he’s in fact a character pretending to be a different
> character, performing his part with word-perfect ease. Something
> similar happens with his wife, who as the story opens is playing
> patience in bed, with a glass of whisky at her side. She knows how to
> make herself comfortable. And she knows how to be the good wife. ‘You
> look tired,’ she says as her husband enters, without looking up from
> her cards. She doesn’t look up because she doesn’t need to: important
> husbands are always tired at the end of the day, and good wives always
> say sympathetic things. Usually, however, they’re required to pretend
> that their sympathy is genuine; her words, like his, are spoken from a
> script for a play she isn’t really acting.
> 
> It’s not just the language: the whole story is slightly askew. For
> something so short it places an unusual emphasis on the passage of
> time. There are several stages. The wife begins in bed, then visits
> the husband in his study, then tells the maid to serve dinner. Dinner
> stretches: ‘My son asked for money during the coffee course; my
> daughter asked for money during the liqueur.’ It’s after the liqueurs
> that the man goes out for his drive, but not before inviting his wife
> along, knowing she’ll refuse because ‘it was time for her soap opera.’
> He finds that the children’s cars are blocking the garage door, so he
> has to carry out a lengthy set of manoeuvres: ‘I moved both cars and
> parked them in the street, moved my car from the garage and parked it
> in the street, put the other two cars back in the garage, and closed
> the door.’ After killing his pedestrian, he comes back home and finds
> his wife on the sofa watching TV. He goes to bed. There’s horror in
> all this yawning slowness. The sequence of events is hard to argue
> with – surely a wife can sit in bed drinking whisky before dinner –
> but it’s oddly unsettling, as if the order has been shuffled; the fact
> that each step is described in such laborious detail makes it all the
> more nightmarish. And this is what the story is about, a collection of
> nightmares: an empty life, an empty wife, words that don’t quite make
> sense, objects that can’t quite be manipulated.
> 
> But there’s still the murder. Fonseca’s stories contain their literal
> collisions – between bus and cow, between a car and a woman’s legs –
> but, more unavoidably, they describe collisions between the rich world
> and the poor. The poor kill the rich and the rich kill the poor, and
> there are more complex entanglements too. A rich woman falls in love
> with a poor man who befriends another poor man who blackmails the rich
> woman. A poor man terrorises a rich man until the rich man snaps and
> kills the poor one. A poor man nurses a rich man. A rich man nurses
> the poor. The permutations are so various that in the end all you can
> see are the patterns, and you realise that Fonseca is playing
> formalist games with social divisions. When other writers address the
> gulf between rich and poor, they do so from some kind of vantage
> point; they are motivated by a need, conscious or not. Some want to
> narrow the gap, to campaign. Others are driven by something like fear:
> in much British fiction of the 1980s and 1990s – in Ian McEwan or
> Martin Amis, say – the poor or their representatives erupt like an
> insistent dream into middle-class life as stalkers or thugs. Fonseca
> also writes about stalkers and thugs, but from both worlds at once.
> And all that can reliably be said about the two worlds as they appear
> in his fiction – since how can we know what he thinks? – is that
> they’re a very long way apart.
> --
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