TWENTY AFTER MIDNIGHT
By Daniel Galera
Translated by Julia Sanches
217 pp. Penguin. Paper, $16.
It’s a sweltering summer in Porto Alegre, Brazil, made worse by the stench of uncollected garbage and the simmering frustrations of a bus strike. The dashed optimism of last year’s street protests, leading up to the 2014 World Cup, still hangs over the city. For three former college friends — Emiliano, Antero and Aurora — things only get grimmer when they hear that Andrei Dukelsky has been gunned down in a robbery. Dukelsky, “one of the most promising new talents of contemporary Brazilian literature,” was the enigmatic ringleader who brought them all together in the late 1990s to write for his pioneering webzine, Orangutan.
So where does that leave the three of them now, as they reminisce in middle age about those freewheeling days at the dawn of the internet age? Emiliano, a hack journalist, wrestles with “the feeling I’d had since turning 40 that I was already in the process of decomposing.” Antero, a trendy marketing guru, clings to appearances of youth, while cheating on his wife and engaging in epic bouts of masturbation. Aurora, the most cynical of the group, is an ecological “doomsdayer” who plans to flee to the forest and listen to “the distant echoes of civilization’s demise” from there.
Galera is the author of several gritty novels set in contemporary Brazil and one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian novelists; he writes with a heady, voracious energy captured in robust prose by Sanches. Masterfully picking away at the impotence and disappointments of this aging band of literary provocateurs, Galera presents a vision of failed promise — of a generation and country — that is as sordid and rotting as the streets of Porto Alegre.
THAT TIME OF YEAR
By Marie NDiaye
Translated by Jordan Stump
136 pp. Two Lines Press. $19.95.
“That Time of Year,” by the prolific, genre-defying French-Senegalese author NDiaye, also takes place in summer — or rather, the days right after a summer holiday’s end. The Parisians Herman and his wife, Rose, have been vacationing in the same rural town in southern France for the past 10 years, but when they decide to stay one day longer — until Sept. 1 — everything takes a sinister twist.
What a difference a day makes! Soon, a cold rain and fog descend; then, Rose and their 8-year-old son go missing. Herman wanders the streets in search of his family, spied on suspiciously by the townspeople and gripped by a growing panic. It’s as if he’s unwittingly stepped onto a Jordan Peele set. “Everything’s turned hostile all of a sudden,” he mutters to himself. “Is it because I’ve seen the fall, is this the price you have to pay?”
Herman is given the runaround by vacant-looking, Kafkaesque officials in matching outfits and unnaturally yellow hair, before moving into a local hotel to better get the lay of the land. Meanwhile, he feels himself metamorphosing: “Like that morning, everything inside him seemed damp and mortified, shrunken, slowly rotting.” More than just losing his mind, he seems to be physically melting away, succumbing to a “dulled, larval inertia.”
NDiaye’s slim novel, first published in France in 1994 and translated by Stump in a sly, deceptive monotone, is a worthy addition to her oeuvre. For all its elements of pyschological horror, there is something hauntingly real to NDiaye’s world, where “pale, serene, detached, smiling faces hid an inconsolable sorrow.”
THE SWORD AND THE SPEAR
By Mia Couto
Translated by David Brookshaw
273 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
The Mozambican writer Couto, winner of the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, has built up his own extraordinary body of work exploring the wounds and dreams of his native land, in books such as “Every Man Is a Race,” “A River Called Time,” “The Tuner of Silences” and “Confessions of the Lioness.” His work is every bit as bewitching as the titles suggest.
“The Sword and the Spear,” the second volume in a historical trilogy, continues the saga of the final confrontations between Portuguese colonial armies and Ngunganyane, king of the Gaza empire, in late-19th-century Mozambique. Like “Woman of Ashes,” the first volume, the new novel unfolds in a series of letters, mainly between Sgt. Germano de Melo, a reluctant soldier besotted with a young VaChopi girl named Imani, and the careerist Lt. Ayres de Ornelas. Their correspondence is interspersed with the voice of Imani herself, and here is where Couto’s storytelling truly soars (poetically rendered from the Portuguese by Brookshaw).
As the novel opens, Imani is accompanying the wounded de Melo down the Inharrime River to a hospital. “Everything always begins with a farewell,” she writes. “This story begins with an ending: the end of my adolescence.” On the way, they hole up at a former Catholic mission, where she reunites with the Goan priest who trained her “to be white” as a young girl at convent school. As in all his books, Couto calls into question the very essence of race and identity, belief and belonging, in Mozambique and beyond. “So you’ve discovered you want to be African?” the priest asks Imani. “I’m curious, my daughter. What is it to be African?”
HEAVEN AND EARTH
By Paolo Giordano
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
406 pp. Pamela Dorman/Viking. $28.
Teresa, the narrator of Giordano’s bighearted novel “Heaven and Earth,” is barely a teenager when she first encounters the three boys who will alter the course of her life. Bern, Nicola and Tommaso live in the masseria — part-farmhouse, part-religious order — next door to Teresa’s grandmother’s home in southern Italy, which Teresa visits each summer from Turin. Bern, especially, makes a powerful impression. Passionate and intense, he is eager to “storm the heavens.”
Like Galera, Giordano follows the trajectories of his characters over the course of several decades, beginning in the mid-90s. But his book is less about a generation’s decline than about the tangle of emotions and rivalries that play out between friends. Teresa and Bern are soon inseparable, and, in their 20s, become the heart of a homesteading collective at the masseria.
There are obstacles to their dreams of a green utopia — local capitalists, for one, and the police, for another. Internal divisions, too, drive a wedge between them, with tragic results. Ultimately, Bern’s passion is all-consuming. “At that moment I felt the frightening immensity of the love he had inside,” Teresa says. “It wasn’t just about the trees, it was about everything and everyone, and it didn’t let him breathe, it was suffocating him.”
Giordano is a fluid, expansive writer (smoothly translated by Appel): The chapters flow effortlessly back and forth in time, pulling us deeper into the story of Teresa and Bern’s great love. The Italian landscape shimmers with their longing. “It all belonged to us,” Bern says. “The trees and the stone walls. The heavens. Even the heavens belonged to us, Teresa.”
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