... Depois, Cheia De Vida

Set in an unnamed Brazilian city and told through multiple narrators, Eliana Alvez Cruz's Solitaria is a novel about the modern-day realities of remains of colonial violence and class disparity, seen through the lives of a mother and daughter who work as live-in maids. Constructed almost in an episodic style, the novel blends a coming-of-age story of Mabel, who wants to break free of the vicious circle of serving the wealthy, almost like a servitude, and her mother Eunice, who accepts things as such because it provides for her family's needs and gives her a haven. But when a tragedy occurs at the Golden Plate apartment, Eunice must decide which side she wants to be on and whom she shall challenge after years of silence, acceptance, and compromise.

Split into three sections, the first part is narrated by Mabel, the second part by Eunice, and inanimate objects narrate the third part of the novel. The foreshadowing of tension at the beginning of the novel concludes in a liberating end in the final chapter of the story.

                  

                  

Mabel's mother, Eunice, works as a live-in maid for a rich family—Ms. Lúcia and Mr. Tiago, owners of a luxury condo in the Golden Plate apartment—where sneaking in only through the service door is considered normal for maids like her. Eunice has an ailing mother, so she must take her child along to work, where an unspoken order separates the private, lavish life lived by the owners from the life in a tiny room occupied by the serving maids, an order that must not be breached. In any case, Mabel must not be seen. But at one point, following a mishap, Mabel's discovered presence nearly cost Eunice her job.

With the little means she has, Eunice has always lived in fear and insecurity, forgetting herself in the grind. It seems Eunice must always make compromises, as if she owes gratitude to everyone for her being. Mabel considers this a servitude more than gratitude and wants to break free. Growing in the shadows of tiny spaces for maids, seeing, gauging, and understanding the way of their life, Mabel starts to have strong opinions—almost a grudge—for the treatment they receive; for the way they are seen and understood. Working for Ms. Lúcia's family, Eunice and Mabel also take care of their daughter. But, seeing the contrast in how they grow up, Mabel doesn't want to spend her life away like her mother. Mabel wants to be educated, free, independent, and get out of the life of servitude.

 

After Everything that happened, beyond the certainty that I didn’t want kids, something else true grew in me: I did not want to be like my mother. More like, I did not want to do what she did. This feeling was the embryo of a distancing between us, one that would need the remedy of time to heal.

Home to the rich and upper class, the Golden Plate apartment is also an abode for many caretakers and maids, but they are always considered outsiders, opportunists, submissive, and lowly. The interwoven lives of people of different classes appear to be in harmony, but a shadow of violence, injustice, and indifference is palpable—not in one event, but on multiple occasions, hidden, said, or unspoken. Not only Mabel, but João, her first love, also wants to live like other kids on the block—unrestricted, with dreams of his own—but that simply makes him a ruffian among the dwellers. Mabel doesn't want to characterize herself and doesn't want the rich to tag her as "these people." Mabel and João are characters of defiance, who want to get out of "the gilded cage." Mother-daughter relationships, father-son relationships, teenage love, adolescent pregnancy, moral dilemmas, and elusiveness have been beautifully explored in Solitaria.

I did not want to clean a house that wasn’t mine. I did not want to take a child to work in anybody else’s house. That was my story, and I did not want to repeat it with my own children. I didn’t even want children! I didn’t want another Ms. Lúcia as a boss or another Camilinha whose diapers I had to change, whom I had to feed and give my time and my love, and one day watch her make messes on purpose, with her parents’ approval, just so she could watch as I cleaned. I did not want to be away from my home for a whole week in order to make someone else’s home more cozy and comfortable.

Mãe and I stayed there, in the gilded cage of the Golden Plate Building. We were birds in a luxury habitat, but isn’t a golden cage still a cage? Every once in a while, our wings would fly us back home—our little house in the distant suburb, or some other faraway place—but we would always go back to our captivity.

The beginning of the first part connects with the start of the second part, where the narrator changes from Mabel to Eunice.

Eunice is a motherly figure who doesn't want insecurities to seep into their lives—already in crisis but moving in a fine balance, earned at whatever cost. Eunice considers the way they live in the Golden Plate building as a part of their lives—a necessary evil. Burdened with responsibilities, she doesn't want to hate her provider. But there are limits to everything, even to human tolerance and patience, before one realizes the value of everything around. Solitaria speaks to and awakens the need to break through the cocoon.

In the third part of the novel, different rooms come out as narrators. They are present to recount what they have witnessed in the lives of Eunice, Mabel, and many others like them. They also testify to the change that is essential and that forces itself out. The infusion of the COVID pandemic into the story has been wonderfully done by the author Eliana Alvez Cruz.

I think that, sometimes, when you are in a bad situation, you get used to it and don’t want to leave because it’s familiar, even though it’s bad. That was how I felt about working in Ms. Lúcia’s house.

Against the backdrop of Afro-Brazilian history, class and racial tensions, the social lives of the wealthy, the struggle between ruling and labor classes, and the modern Brazilian class structure are all subtly explored in the novel. While stories from the favelas are often told, the divide extends far beyond, deeply affecting the lives of ordinary people. At one point, the narrative warns that "the melting was about to blow…," powerfully illustrating how "money whitens" and highlighting the ongoing crisis of social and economic integration—a crisis unresolved since the Golden Law. 

The clear voice and well-built architecture of the novel keep the narrative succinct, subtle, and yet sharp. Constructed in three parts—Mabel, Eunice, and Solitárias—the novel loosely follows both an episodic and non-linear narrative; however, it keeps the story thread intact and smooth. Other than Eunice and Mabel, characters such as Sérgio, Jurandir, João Pedro, Cacau, Ms. Lúcia, Mr. Tiago, Camila, Irene, Bruninho, Ms. Imaculada, Dadá, Mr. Grenito, and Ms. Hilda have been nicely established, each serving a purposeful presence.

Since Mabel spends her formative years in those tiny rooms and shrunken spaces, the first part of the novel is constructed to reflect how spaces and objects shape or form memories of happiness, sadness, tragedy, horror, injustice, and even awkwardness. The chapters are constructed in a way that the inanimate objects and spaces—like the backyard, pool, kitchen, study, party room, stairs, windows—become essential markers in the development of the story without compromising the main narrative.

 

I know that, deep down, I wasn’t a room. I was a solitária. Exactly that. A prison, a place meant to separate these lives from the world and from the other residents. I am so small . . .

As we come toward the final chapters, we come to realize that we thrive for freedom, and we attach our hope and freedom to our dreams. The hidden, tormented, and compromised lives must break free—redemption is a necessity; so is defiance. People who have lived all their lives with disparity, injustice, and unspoken violence will fight back, will claim, will earn what they always deserved. And finally, places shape us, but we can shape the places too—not just the physical ones but the way we live, our own private space—where societal boundaries tend to break and dreams thrive, where Solitária can transform to cheia de vida. Solitária is a novel of sacrifice, courage, and redemption.

Original Text: Portuguese
Translator: Benjamin Brooks
Publisher: Astra House 

Source: Review Copy from the Publisher

Author Photo:  Revista Bula

PS:

My Favorite Chapter: Little-Bathroom 

Tragedy of a Petrostate, Catharsis of a Daughter

We know culture shapes our personality and beliefs – we may accept, it may orient or disorient us in certain ways. But how does politics, political system and regime shape our lives, disrupt it, and intrude on our personal relations? Most of us feel victimized by our governments – we hate it, bear it, and change it for good or worst outcomes. But imagine, when you can no longer separate your personal and family life from the fate of your country; when your nation's political and economic scene no longer holds assurance to your dreams, but rather seeps into your relation, unsettles it and makes your everyday life difficult. Paula Ramón's memoir Motherland brings us face to face with the tragedies born out of a political system, and fueled by its crisis. 

Venezuela, its political and economic turmoil, has formed the background for this memoir. However, this story is relatable to many of us in Latin America, South Asia and Africa, and elsewhere, where we have experienced how politics and people in power shaped our childhood memories, our lives now and the kind of future that our country holds for us. Venezuelan politics and economics have been ruthless to Paula, her family, her relations and many like her. But this memoir is not an acceptance of defeat of an individual against her country. This is a memoir has been written as a relief and to heal her memories associated with her mother, her family and her country Venezuela.

Paula takes us to 1970s Maracaibo, when the Venezuelan oil reserves promised prosperity to everyone. Intertwining her family roots, beliefs and political changes in the country, Paula provides enough evidence on how a once prosperous country with even richer history slowly met its downfall. Old political leadership plunged the economy into crisis, while those promising a new future, didn't prove as good their nationalist virtues and propagandas. Result – repressed citizens, citizens dazzled with nationalism, few privileged and many underprivileged citizens, and citizens feeling rootless in their own nation.  

Born in 1981, Paula first became a witness and then a victim of the changes in Venezuelan political system; she could never cast off the shadow of the one or other form of political crisis from her personal life, as if her generation were born to accept it – crisis, one that never resolves. Paula recounts how her parents managed to at least provide their children a secured life amidst the deteriorating economic difficulties in the country. But, things were to change soon. Chavismo and Bolivarian Revolution would soon change the color of the nation – supporters saw it in rainbow colors of their savior and his power. However, the social color described by Paula is rather dark, and so became her personal life, torn between a country that no longer holds any promise to her future, and her love and responsibility towards her mother, who didn't want to leave her house.

Just like Paula has been open about her family relations and its inner chemistry, she hasn't failed to give her views and take stand on her fierce and satirical criticism of Chavez led Bolivarian revolution and its futile promises.  There may be difference of opinions, but the impact on the social, economic and personal sphere, breaking families and causing large migration from the country cannot be ignored. Those of us, who know little about social consequences of political development in Venezuela before and after Chavez, this memoir will be an eye-opener, as if we lived through it, experienced it firsthand – to see through deteriorating democracy giving rise to populists and saviors, who turn into dictators.

'True, Chávez was extremely popular, but winning elections with the help of a biased National Electoral Council, discretional use of state resources, and the Congress and Supreme Court of Justice in his pocket was not exactly democratic.'

Here we find the portrayals of Paula's father and mother, who found each other and settled in Maracaibo, trying their luck to establish a prosperous life, driven in part by dreams and aspirations, and in part believing richness and future of the land. We see their lives marked by political upheavals, events, and beliefs, as if they were surrounded and possessed by a political drama, which imposed its rules on them, on their happy life. Like Paula has written in the book, she was raised just like a postwar child, driven by beliefs of her parents who had values – gift of their memories and experience of poverty and war.

When the economy of Venezuela took a tumultuous path, its oil income and economy didn't make for the public debt and deficits. While the government was hitting hard to show a polished image of a successful nation, economic indicators and the market were all in havoc. And while people's belief guided and blinded by the authority, state media and power left the country divided and led to fractured and weak voices and backups, corruption, depreciation, violence, inflation, food and power shortage led to everyday struggle to manage resources. Paula's family, like many other families were caught in this trap. What we see is a lonely mother sinking in this crisis, and a daughter trying to save her from the shore.

'Political Instability frightened my parents, and economic instability suffocated them.'

Further, what we see is politicians driving the country through patriotic sentiments and nationalist agendas, without able to manage its resources nor able to improve its declining economy. Like said earlier, people were divided, people had grown frustrated with politicians and had longed and saved their enthusiasm for saviors. With the rise of Hugo Chávez (with a military background), we see how he used power and support to orient the whole judicial and electoral system to his favor to further his power and tighten the regime (which is what his successor Nicolás Maduro is doing now), crumbling the old political parties, and thus creating a "political polarization." Amidst all this, Paula and her family, show sign of disintegration, especially after the death of her father.

'Every personal or professional moment of my life during that time was in some way marked by the political crisis.'

Demonstrations were everyday part of their social life when Paula tried to make a living as a journalist in Caracas, and country was torn between pro-Chávez and oppositions, state hated the private media and even toppled many of them. Meanwhile, Chávez took control over PDVSA, the national oil company, a foundation to Venezuelan's economy, killed protests, defied the oppositions, used state resources to fund popular social reform programs and cashed in votes that helped him stay in power, through "illegal maneuverings." Paula was trying to find stability, tried to be independent, and support herself and her mother. Chávez was taking control over the private businesses and was ruining them, nationalizing revenue entities but failing to curb the inflation. Market demand was barely fulfilled by the supply, leading to increased price of commodities and formation of parallel black market. This memoir shows unfolding of power-politics, unveils the layer after layer of a state in ruins and a failing fate of a family reflecting that of the country. 

'When you live far from home, the nostalgia comes and goes. You romanticize memories and wallow in the absences. You survive on stories, and the adage that the past is always better becomes truer by the day. Reminiscing becomes your favorite pastime. I insisted on reliving things that were dead.'

Paula's complex relationship with her brothers and mother, shaped because of individual personalities and choices but also because of country's crisis, led them each on their separate ways. Paula was torn between her own personal life, her career and her responsibility towards her mother who had been left alone. Paula had to live outside Venezuela for one or another reason. Her mother, who once took charge of the family after the death of her husband, and who tried to keep her honor until the end of her life, was sick and lonely. Paula took the responsibility of making her mother's life easier at home, taking care of both her basic needs and emotional needs. We see, how Paula's realizations, that further strengthened her love for her mother though she had a complex relation with her, she tried her best to understand her, provide care for her – as if her mother had become her only link to the country.

'It became obvious that we didn't have what it took to survive the collapse of Venezuela as a family.'

Failing system of basic necessities to the citizens, banking crisis, plundered national currency, surging poverty due to skyrocketed inflation, massive corruption, high homicide rate, high migration rate, dissent voices silenced by oppression, all this were leading Venezuela to a path to becoming a failed petrostate. Over the years people's saviors have turned into someone they hate, for making their lives so miserable, uncomfortable and disgusting, with their authoritarian dictatorship. Despite thousands of demonstrations, Venezuelan democracy and its people continue to suffer. This is not a narrative of some regional powers – Paula's memoir is as true as a daughter can be to her motherly love.

This memoir may be burned, banned, or dismissed by cynics and those in Venezuelan power, but its truth will stand out, it has stood out – the cause and cost of humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. Paula's memoir is against all those in power! Paula's memoir is for all the daughters and mothers! The book is not only about motherland, but also about motherhood, love, sacrifice, responsibility and resilience.

A must read book!

Author: Paula Ramón
Original Text: Portuguese
Translator: Julia Sanches and Jennifer Shyue
Publisher: Amazon Publishing

Source: Over The River Public Relations/Review Copy from the Publisher

Coming Soon...

The Looking-Glass
Essential Stories
by Machado de Assis

Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

Coming Soon...

CHRONICLE OF THE MURDERED HOUSE
by Lúcio Cardoso

Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa & Robin Patterson

Coming Soon...

Monsoon
by Vimala Devi

Translated from the Portuguese by Paul Melo e Castro 

Coming Soon...

The Madwoman of Serrano 
by Dina Salustio 

Translated from the Portuguese Jethro Soutar

Coming Soon...

Machado de Assis: 26 Stories
by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Translated from the Portuguese Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

Drenched with Magic

First Published in 1994, only few years after the civil war ended in Mozambique Rain and Other Stories is a collection of 26 short stories that span from hopeful realism after the war to fantasy. Some descriptions are even dreamlike with subtle plots blended with idiosyncratic craft of the author. Not all stories resonate the war with stark images, and as said by Couto as a prologue, these stories are from those corners of living where war couldn't reach, voices that are ever present in the form of folktales, human complexions and desires. These dramatic tales of baffling outcomes poses characters in search of something not ordinarily present, and tragedies or even satires without the war in the center. The solitude of characters and the ways of finding solace are surprising for their odd ways as well as tenderness. The elevated language¹ of the prose is present throughout the collection.

1.       Every tale loves to masquerade as the truth. But words are nothing more than smoke, too weightless to stick to the present reality. Every truth aspires to be a tale. Facts dream of becoming words, sweet fragrances running from the world. You’ll see in this case that it’s only in the fiction of our wonderment that the truth meets the tale.

Some add mystifying quality to the landscape, both dreamlike and meditative², with narratives like folklore as in The Water of Time in which a grandfather takes his grandson on a voyage to the hinterlands of the marshes to teach him see the Others. Other stories include a blue eyed girl who'd stay behind amid the outbreak of the war for her father, with fantastical ending; A more than an ordinary guide parts with a blind man to enroll in the war, leaving behind the invented details for the blind man; Infidelity comes to light during a delivery and changes a husband wife relation forever; A shattered perfume bottle permeates a parting husband and wife's sorrows; A wife tries to find solace after her husband's death in odd ways; The title story Rain is a story of hope and doubt taking shape amid rain falling constantly to mark the end of war; A stubborn old man resist the evacuation, and starts digging in his backyard; A tragic fate of a boy under the flag; An old man feeling neglected at his ninety third birthday finds companion out of the family; A man who always tried to stay out of trouble falls victim to authorities; Sacred coconut fruit that could speak and is filled with blood; A hippo appears at a school and starts chewing furniture with tragic and fantastic outcome and other stories with varied tones and texture³.

2.       I’m no man of the church. I find it impossible to believe and this causes me distress. Because after all, I hold within me all the religiosity one could ask of any believer. I’m religious without religion. I suffer, you’d have to say, from a condition called poetry: I dream up places where I’ve never set foot, I believe only in that which cannot be proven. And even if I were to pray today, I wouldn’t know what to ask of God. This is my fear: only the mad don’t know what to ask of God. Or is it possible that God has lost faith in man? Anyway, my appetite for visiting churches comes only from the tranquilitude of these small vaulted spaces, filled with soothing shadows. Here, I’m able to breathe. Outside the world awaits with its unresolved calamities.

3.       I’ve been seated at the window watching the rain fall for three days now. How I’ve missed the soggy rin-a-tin-tin of each raindrop. The perfuming earth reminiscent of a woman on the eve of affection. How many years has it been since it last rained like this? Having lasted so long, the drought had slowly silenced our suffering. The heavens watched the earth’s progressive decline and saw its own death mirrored. We intirrigated ourselves: was it still possible to begin anew, was there still a place for joy?

These stories are almost fantastic imbued with despair born out of the ambience projecting the melancholy of being left alone, which the new generation cannot detect; Idiosyncratic longings of the characters, longings that are very personal of people driven by passion, rooted in reminiscence and betrayals. Philosophizing the gaps, puzzles of reality and beyond, deconstructing the silences, fooling about death and dreams like a shuffling of pictures and subtle play of politics and violence in the backdrop, culture taking shape, lost love, surprising outcomes, these are some of the themes found in the stories. Becker's translation offers the best the language has to offer and fully captures the essence of Couto's luminous prose.

Author: Mia Couto

Translator: Eric M.B. Becker                                                           

Publisher: Biblioasis

Page Count: 163

Price: $19.95

Past Not Forgotten

Resistance is a different reading experience—a quasi-fiction, and largely autobiographical. Narrator is searching, creating, eluding, hunting the pasts of his family, and trying to understand or give a meaning to his relationship with the adoptive brother. Narrator has managed to create duplicity and duality of reality. Sebastián, the storyteller, has used fragments of images from the household talking and his own experience of growing up, to create a past, which sometimes seems ambiguous, imbued with conflict of the versions of truth, memory that can and cannot be trusted.

Dictatorships can come

back, I know, and I also know that the arbitrariness, the

oppressions, the suffering, exist in all kinds of ways, in all

kinds of regimes, even when hordes of citizens march

biennially to the ballot box

                                                    

The pure literary expressions and impressions have connected the characters, often trying to portray their inner beings, posed in front of universal themes of love and relation. There is not a sequence of events to follow in the story. Memories draw the past, and again the past projects memories. The story is about a family—victim of political exile—who moves from Argentina to Brazil with an adopted son, and later has have two other children in Brazil. The story is told by the youngest of the children, who digs into the family history and secrets, and problems of adoption. He visits the land from where his parents had fled, and feels that he's inherited the sense of exile.

I know that I am writing my failure. I don’t really know

what I’m writing. I waver between an incomprehensible

attachment to reality – or to the paltry spoils of the world

we usually call reality – and an inexorable pull towards

telling tales, an alternative gimmick, a desire to forge

the meanings life refuses to give us.

                                        

The sentences are packed with meanings and it asks readers to stay with the text—often short and lyrical, and meant to be absorbed and felt than understood. Story tends to capture the forgotten time, and shifts between the strata of exile and family tension. Discovering and accepting the new identities is also a theme of the novel—Identities, which couldn't become sharp, and wavering in family affairs. The author has said in an interview that history is always filled with stories of resistance, and his interest in the modes of resistance is clearly an echo heard here all over. Narrator tries to understand the past, identifying himself in the being of his brother and parents, and discovers his own hidden characters. The episodes reconstructed from the memories of the past outlines narrator's struggle to get attached and loved by his brother. He's also troubled by his own instinct, on why is he so interested in the past, especially about his parent's political involvement and their retreat. It may also seem he is juggling with the memory, sometimes projecting it pitch-perfect and at other times rendering it like a suspension of clouds—the spaces we create around ourselves, may or may not be the outcome of our choices.

Hard to appreciate the full weight an insignificant

thing can assume when various interpretations are

projected onto it, when so many meanings crystallise

within it. To move from the most banal circumstances to

a feeling of tragedy, sometimes all it takes is a subtle slip,

a minor error.

It is hard for narrator's brother to accept his weight, his being and his identity. His reclusiveness has sparked the narrator to visit buried memories, and see himself in those mirrors of the time. Themes of silence, terror of the past and struggle with selves are fixated in the story. This is not a plot driven story. It feels like essayistic narration, psychological drama and definition of impressions as well. At times, the self-declaration of the narrator, defining the character of the story he is telling, removes us from all the confusion we may get trying to make the meaning of the text. Metafictional use of narration has served the purpose well: "Quite without subtlety, I find myself afraid: maybe this book is the error, created for a non-existent addressee." Resistance is a pure literary charm.

Author: Julián Fuks

Translator: Daniel Hahn

Publisher: Charco Press

Page Count: 150

Price: $14.46