Whenever I travelled overseas for work, I loved to ask my colleagues for recommendations of authors from their country.
This was how I discovered authors like Yukio Mishima (Japan), Amilie Nothomb (Belgium) and Joachim Maria Machado de Assis (Brazil).
Brazilian colleagues also recommended Beatriz Bacher who was a screenwriter and literary editor as well as the author of three novels and two short story collections.
Antonio was published in 2007 but it took another 15 years before Pushkin Press issued the first English translation.
It’s a dark novel in which pieces the complicated lives of different generations of a privileged Sao Paulo family are pieced together from individuals’ memories.
At the heart of the story is Teodoro (Teo), his father Xavier, and Elenir, the woman they both loved . Teo’s best friend Raul, his mother Isabel and Haroldo Xavier’s best friend from his youth, each attempt to shed light on the defining moments in the lives of these two men.
They are they talking now, many years after the deaths of both men, because Benjamim, son of Teo and grandson of Xavier, is about to become a father and wants to understand his family’s history. He was raised by his father and grandmother after his mother Elenir died in childbirth. What he doesn’t know concerns his grandfather’s previous relationship with Elinor, how/why that ended and how his father died.
What the three narrators reveal in their conversations with Benjamin is a complex and unhappy story of infant death, mental breakdowns and insanity.
Antonio is a challenging read but not just because it covers unsettling topics. The structure itself poses a challenge. I couldn’t get to grip for a long time on how all the various characters were connected — it didn’t help that there were two Benjamims. I’m not sure I had it fully worked out even by the end of the book. Adding to my difficulty was that the book related events from different time periods but not in a sequential way. So I was never sure what happened when.
What did interest me was that Antonio shows the flaws inherent in any attempt to tell the truth about past events and the individuals involved.
None of the narrators has a full handle on what happened. At times they rely on third part accounts, particularly about the years Teo’ spent working on farms away from Sao Paulo.
Even when they relate incidents they witnessed personally, their accounts differ, sometimes markedly so. As the late Queen Elizabeth said of the allegations made by Prince Harry in the Oprah Winfrey interview “recollections may vary” .
Here, it’s Isabel who issues the warning about truth telling. There’s a whole mythology built up around Xavier and Teo over the years she tells her grandson. Some of so called “facts” are exaggerated, some anecdotes filtered to reflect best on the teller though “in this story, no one can say they did what was right or wrong.”
I’m counting this book for both 20booksofsummer26 and Women in Translation month.
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