Antonio, by Beatriz Bracher, translated by Adam Morris, possesses many of the ingredients of a good novel. It is dappled with beautiful anecdotes. Its drama is oblique. Its formal conceit is elegant, and at times, Bracher writes lines of true and lasting wisdom. But vague characters, wooden prose, and forced metafictional outbursts condemn the novel to flatness.
Bracher is one of Brazil’s most respected living novelists. She has won several awards, including the Sao Paulo Prize, the Rio Prize, and the Clarice Lispector Prize. She came of age during the military dictatorship (1964-1985), a regime notorious for torturing dissidents, and her second novel, I Didn’t Talk, depicts a man tortured for being a communist. His brother dies during the same interrogation, and for the rest of his life, he suffers from guilt and the rumor that he gave in to his torturers and talked. Bracher’s fiction, then, tends to be intimate, historically conscious, and dark.
In Antonio, Bracher’s third novel, the darkness falls softly. There is no torture, only a comfortable graphic designer named Benjamim Kremz asking questions about his family. Benjamim is about to have a son, and he wants to know what happened to his father, Teodoro, and his grandfather, Xavier, who both went insane, before he enters fatherhood. To this end, he visits three people who knew Xavier and Teodoro. These interviewees become the novel’s narrators.
First, there is Raul, his father’s classmate. Next comes Haroldo, Xavier’s best friend, a curmudgeon who grumbles about the rootlessness of the Brazilian youth. Finally, there is Isabel, Xavier’s widow, an acid-tongued old woman who is dying in a Sao Paulo hospital.
The narrators bleed together into a single voice. They are not really characters, only scaffolding, supports for the novel’s best moments, which are anecdotes about Teodoro and Xavier. In one, Xavier reads Genesis aloud to his priggish mother, then chases her out of his room, masturbating. In another, Teodoro rescues a friend from being raped, and in the process, he kills the rapist with a rock.
Teodoro is the novel’s most interesting character, the only one endowed with particularity and sharp edges. He is a mad philosopher, a Brazilian Diogenes, and in certain scenes, he is magnetic. When friends visit him for a steamboat cruise, he preens, pontificates, and tries to sleep with all the girls. Bracher does a good job depicting the paradox of the young intellectual: Teo’s truth-seeking is narcissistic, performative, and obnoxious, but also entirely sincere. This sincerity alienates him from his family, drives him insane, and, with a sad inexorability, leads to his death.
Benjamim is the hollow at the heart of the novel. We never hear him speak. The narrators sometimes respond to a word or a shift in posture as he interviews them, but essentially, he is invisible. His questions are not urgent — he is merely curious. Antonio is governed by stasis, absence, and decay. Everything of interest has already happened. The drama is frozen in the past.
The first bit of drama, soon revealed, is that Xavier and Teodoro married the same woman, decades apart. “Sleeping with your father’s woman,” marvels one narrator. “Can anyone stand it without gouging his eyes out and being condemned to wander?” With its clumsy paraphrase of Sophocles and stagey rhetoric (“can anyone stand it?”), this line suggests the woodenness of Antonio’s prose.
It’s tough to criticize the prose of a translated novel. Where does the woodenness originate: Bracher’s Portuguese or Morris’s English? To a reader approaching the novel for the first time, it doesn’t matter. It is enough that the sentences are wooden, that the details are stock, that the descriptions of Sao Paulo could pass for almost any city. Houses are “sunny with high ceilings.” Yards are “full of trees.” Bracher’s narrators all sound the same: groggy, didactic, and slightly disapproving.
Here is Haroldo complaining about Isabel’s children: “She raised a bunch of irresponsible ingrates who are incapable of the most basic displays of solidarity, like visiting their dying mother.” Irresponsible ingrates! The most basic displays of solidarity! Haroldo sounds like a video game NPC, spooning exposition into the gamer’s mouth.
The prose is not always this clunky. Bracher likes a neat phrase, and throughout the novel, she shows a fondness for epigrams. You could almost make a book of them:
“Nobody knows anything about life until they have children.”
“When the toilet clogs, the world stops, that’s how it is.”
“Words ruin anything that’s about to happen. … They turn it into something mediocre.”
“Life is so hard on us, in one way or another, that we end up transforming ourselves, inevitably, into beings that are smaller than the destiny that youth promises us.”
There is wisdom in these lines, but it is abstract wisdom, commonplace wisdom, devoid of personality. Anyone might have said them. Every character in the novel, except Teo, is a piece of luggage for transporting the author’s ideas rather than a hot-blooded person.
The novel does contain some moving passages. In one, Teodoro remembers seeing his mother’s legs approaching through a gap in a fence when he was a child. The potency of this image comes from its strange specificity — the mother’s legs isolated from the rest of her body, moving back and forth in the fence’s frame — which most of the novel lacks. Antonio is littered with passages of weird beauty, but they are rarely sustained for more than a few pages.
The novel’s least successful moments are metafictional:
We’re not literature, my dear. We’re love and sperm, blood, laughter, hatred, death, and illness, phlegm and farts, baths, medicine, doctors, schools, tests, guitar, English, swimming, ballet, maids, nannies, fingernail clippings, toothbrushes, cuts, Mercurochrome, lice, chickenpox, potassium permanganate, tears, birthday candles, holidays, beaches, horses, tumbles, joys, work, salaries, inheritance, time, and so much more that comes between one encounter and the next.
Lists can be excellent devices. Concrete objects ooze a mysterious pathos, and the right objects in the right order can break your heart. The problem is the abstract banality of the list: “medicine,” “schools,” “joys,” “tears,” “salaries,” “time,” and “so much more.” Most of the nouns, except the fascinating pair of “phlegm and farts,” evoke boredom. Of course, that seems to be Bracher’s point. Literature is interesting, but real life is banal, and “we’re not literature.” Whether or not you agree with this formula, it is unlikely to produce memorable fiction.
Vladimir Nabokov said that every novel must build a dream world. Even if it is a simulacrum of reality, a dream atmosphere and dream logic obtain. In passages like this, Bracher lets the dreaminess out of the dream. By rejecting the enchantment of fiction and asserting the banality of “real life” in its place, she hopes to win points for authenticity, but all that results is a flattening of both fiction and life. The book deflates, the mystery flees, and the reader is left with a creeping sense of the flatness of all things.
In the final chapter, the novel almost sputters to life. Isabel has died, and her family is in town to prepare the body. During the cleaning ritual, her daughter tells the nurses to leave her alone with the body. She will do the rest. It is a sentimental choice, and she does a bad job, ending up covered in her late mother’s bodily fluids. The scene is shocking, the most horrible and grotesque in the book, and for that reason, in a strange way, it is the most hopeful. Brute matter has asserted itself. The characters are shocked out of their complacency. Reading this chapter, no one can say that literature, or life, is boring.
Forester McClatchey is a poet and critic from Atlanta, Georgia. He holds a master of fine arts from the University of Florida, and his work appears in the Hopkins Review, Slice, and Harvard Review, among other journals.
