The 10 best Brazilian novels of 2022
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), one of the most complete – and complex – thinkers in history, defended the need for a new beginning as one of life’s central questions. Central to Heidegger’s thinking is, among other things, the appreciation of the many discoveries that man makes during a life that always seems to him too short (and it is in reality), but certainly takes on other colors, an unexpected freshness, some powerful enough to make it deviate from the abyss, while urging us to repeatedly test new limits, as if, more than oxygen, water and bread, we should first provide ourselves with a good bag of coincidences. Man’s restlessness in the face of the passage of time – tireless, cruel, cruel – and its cornucopia of mysteries, the solution of which is merely illusory, gives humanity one of the few certainties that can be extracted from this muddy and Edenic field that is life: it never miss a good opportunity.
Few ideas go back to the image of taking advantage of the world, of this and even of another world in which they will live – now enchanted, as Guimarães Rosa would say – the rare women and men who occupied a prominent place on Earth, which is a tale in smooth language, full of lyrical allegories, about the life and even more about the afterlife of two prides that the Brazilian breeze no longer shakes, much less kisses. “A Vida Futura” (Companhia das Letras) by the journalist Sérgio Rodrigues intends to interrupt the eternal sleep of none other than Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) and José Martiniano de Alencar (1829-1877), two of the great connoisseurs of the vernacular on this ground discovered by Cabral, besides of course story-tellers of incomparable talent. In “A Vida Futura”, Rodrigues composes an analysis very much in his style, sharp, blunt, precise, about the “new Portuguese” that has been spoken in Brazil since urgent and fair guidelines emerged as the most dignified treatment for non- binary people, those who do not identify as a specific gender. The author is an amateur philologist (and a good one) and draws attention to the problem of neutral language, which is dangerous precisely because it reinforces prejudice.
Naturally, “A Vida Futura” and nine other Brazilian publications, all launched in this busy 2022, are on our list of the best of the year, already a classic here at Bula. To achieve that, we were guided by the responses to the newsletter sent to readers via e-mail, as well as by interactions between readers on our profiles on Facebook and Twitter. The texts for the synopses were provided by the respective publishers.
There’s still time to catch up on reading and challenge these top ten scorers to the million-dollar derby. Complete the team, don’t choke the scream in your throat anymore and go out to embrace this championship where everyone wins!
1 – The Future Life, by Sergio Rodrigues
In the unique pen of Sérgio Rodrigues, José de Alencar and Machado de Assis revive in the 21st century in a unique, erudite and inventive novel. After learning that their books would be rewritten to reach more readers, the late José de Alencar and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis leave Olympus and land in Rio de Janeiro 2020. There, Jota and Jota become involved with militiamen and meet a young student so enigmatic and passionate and find himself grappling with contemporary identity debates. About the book, Ana Maria Machado wrote: “I go and feel delighted after reading A vida futuro, transported by the language to a very special place – which is rightly ours, but we rarely have the opportunity to visit it. A crack move In the crowd thank writers and readers of our language”.
2 — The Last Address of Eça de Queiroz, by Miguel Sanches Neto
In this unreliable tale of a guy who aspires to write a novel, the question of identity is central. The narrator assumes the pseudonym Rodrigo SM, kidnapped from “A Hora da Estrela”, by Clarice Lispector, leaving behind his ordinary past. Deciding to cross the ocean in search of, in his words, ‘civilization’, he goes to Portugal on a journey that balances between caustic irony and homage to the pantheon of writers in Portuguese literature. His target soon becomes the legendary Eça de Queiroz, whose paths he seeks to retrace in search of inspiration for a book. Like a Portuguese-speaking Don Quixote, the narrator needs to feel bitter that the idealized scenarios of his readings do not coincide with the reality that awaits him in the most diverse destinations, which include a bizarre celebration of Hitler’s birthday.
3 — The head of the father, by Denise Sant’Anna
The story begins when the narrator’s father, elderly and exhausted from caring for his wife with Alzheimer’s, although physically and mentally active, suffers a hemorrhagic stroke. The tragic episode opens a window into affective memory and reveals a web of familial and social relations about the awareness of death. With each chapter structured around an organ or limb of the body, the novel takes off in the mix of personal account, memorial and tragicomic-tinged fiction. Her powerful reading of the growing medicalization of life, where we are stuffed with drugs and, when we are older or vulnerable, disposed of mechanisms to prolong our insecurities, is drawn from family anecdotes and stories by the narrator – remembered with the ease that only distancing us can give. time is able to offer.
4 — The Things I Don’t Remember, I Am, by Jacques Fux
In a poetic way, the author weaves memories, stitches together generations of testimony, follows the echoes of what happened and still hears himself without knowing it. He plunges into the primordial abyss. He does not remember, whether he is Yiddish or Portuguese, the deluge that bathed his body with “the song of morning prayers, the words of which he does not remember, or what he sang fervently in a language he did not understand”. The work pursues the indeterminate moment that defines its existence, such as the sound of words heard, spoken, silenced, the shock of language piercing the body, a ground breaking that can only be suspected, confabulated, hallucinated, wild… learn nothing , just pretend, fake, run away.” Yes! We are hollow beings, everyone is crazy. “I can’t remember the things I forgot to live.” Jacques Fux pursues with his writing the absent place of meaning, the root of it forgotten languages in the fiction of what is said to be.
5 – Here. In This Place, by Maria José Silveira
In a bygone era, pre-European invasions, a host of creatures and people of the forest prepare for a clash that promises to shake life on the planet. In this dystopian and metaphorical novel by Maria José Silveira, virile Amazons and warriors share the stage with ambiguous and comic figures, such as the brothers Macu and Naíma, a copy of Pedro Malasartes, as well as many other creatures from national folklore. In a plot that marches in several directions to reach a mythical arena, the author involves us in a story that mixes humor, sensuality and social criticism.
6 — Beatriz and the Poet, by Cristovão Tezza
In 2020, when she experiences the first relief after the hardest period of the pandemic, the translator Beatriz returns to visit a cafe near her home in Curitiba. The break in the character’s meticulous work – the translation into Portuguese of the essays of a controversial Catalan thinker – is interrupted by a surprise: the appearance of the young poet Gabriel, who met her as a teenager. The timid and clumsy approach ends up developing into a peculiar relationship, the subject of this new novel by Cristovão Tezza, which does not allow itself to fall into cynicism or formalism: the truths of his literature, although not always easy, are comforting , always. available to those who have the courage to see them.
7 — Lonely, by Eliana Alves Cruz
“Lonely” tells the story of two black women, Mabel and Eunice, mother and daughter, who live to work in a luxury condominium like those found in every big Brazilian city. Eunice, the mother, is a key witness to a shocking crime that took place in the bosses’ house. Mabel, the daughter, builds the path that leads not only to the solving of this crime, but to a radical change in the lives of the people around the main characters. In supple, intense and assertive prose, Eliana Alves Cruz builds a myriad of stories revolving around the imaginary of domestic work in Brazil – still so linked to the era of slavery – and relates it to pressing contemporary issues such as the pandemic, the affirmative action debate and the struggle for reproductive rights.
8 — Abyssal Expedition, by Hélverton Baiano
Novel with innovative and regional language. It tells the adventures of professors and researchers to a complex of caves in the 1970s for the purpose of researching radioactive minerals and others. It travels through the saga of these scientists who got lost in this endeavour, in the relationship between them and the discoveries they make, and how they ended a month and a half orbit lost beneath the world. The story takes on a fictional touch from the author, who visited the cave complex of Serra Geral and imagined the situation told to him by one of these teachers. It takes place in the cerrado, the predominant vegetation of this area, and takes the shape of a fantasy or fantastical reality created by the author.
9 — Baldomero, by Leandro Rafael Perez
In an experimental language that combines prose, poetry and good humor, Leandro Rafael Perez debuts in fiction with a small ode to Joyce’s “Ulysses”, which has one foot in gay life and the other in the problems of the 21st century. men’s desire for manhood and the general pressure for them to be just that, and just that in all its load of misogyny and apathy, the author gives birth to a character unforgettable in his insignificance. It is not by chance that Baldomero wanders around the city, but what dominates in this novel is passivity, the sense of paralysis that comes with trying to live and think while working and surviving in the age of consumption.
10 — Micaiah, by Taiane Santi Martins
Mikaia, debut novel by Taiane Santi Martins and winner of the 2022 Sesc Literature Prize, tells the story of three generations of women living and fleeing war-torn Mozambique through the search for Mikaia, a ballet dancer who suffers from sudden amnesia. Narrated by multiple voices, the book plays with the different ways of dealing with a traumatic past, because while Mikaia wants to remember, her sister, Simi, wants to forget, and her grandmother, Shaira, decides to remain silent. The unfolding of the action takes place in the clash between Micaiah’s attempt to recover a past that was stolen from her, the fragments of memory that remain confused, and Simi’s resistance to giving up a childhood invented and cultivated for twenty years at the cost of oblivion. .
