João Almino - The quixotic step of the narrative, the books are inscribed in the book, the failed hero, religion and faith, the East and West, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, Brazil and the world, it condenses this novel in which youth and politics join hands, as we remember, not so long ago, the impossible still seemed necessary and urgent

João Almino, Enigmas of Spring, Trans. by Rhett McNeil, Dalkey Archive Press, 2017.


Majnun lives his life online in his grandparents’ well-appointed home in the Brazilian capital. No school, no work—just bored in Brasília. After falling in love with a married woman, however, he flees to Madrid with friends, intent on, well … something. Writing a historical novel about medieval Spain? Or perhaps converting to Islam and heading to North Africa? As Majnun floats through the crowds of Catholics, through encounters with legitimate medievalists, through romances, friendships, mosques, and palaces, his vague interests threaten to boil over into violent, even deadly action.


Candid and profound reflection on the lack of alternatives, this book is also about the reason, coupled with the imagination, brings forth outputs. Not the abstract reason and omnipotent, able to promote the horror, but a reason that wants to test the world and learn in the perennial struggle between tolerance and intolerance.
The quixotic step of the narrative, the books are inscribed in the book, the failed hero, religion and faith, the East and West, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, Brazil and the world, it condenses this novel in which youth and politics join hands, as we remember, not so long ago, the impossible still seemed necessary and urgent.
On the most dubious springs, the search protagonist, confused and insatiable, the horizon that comforts but insists on doing far. This is a book about the theft of utopia, and is therefore about our time. But it is also, at the end, a bet high and sound in the revival of hope. Spring puzzles, in short, is about the time when the future and the desire are, having the writer as unique and anguished witness.


“Among our country’s greatest authors. Brazil is summed up in his pages.” —Moacyr Scliar


The young central figure in Enigmas of Spring is very much a dreamer -- and he is even presented as not-quite-real: "let's call our hero Majnun", the author suggests in the opening chapter, assigning the character a name that then pairs well with the woman he falls in love with: Laila (as in the classic love story of Layla and Majnun, most famously in Nizami's epic). His actual dreams -- into which he falls deeply and completely -- are vivid and, to him, very lifelike -- and offer him an entrée into the world that currently preoccupies him, fifteenth century Spain and the (Islamic) Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, with repeated encounters with Boabdil (Muhammad XII, the last of the Nasrid line in Granada).
       An aspiring history student in contemporary Brazil, but having failed the university entrance exam, Majnun is somewhat at sea; among his other current ambitions are to write a novella (not a novel, but a novella). With a father who is dead (of an overdose) and a mother who has long been institutionalized, he has grown up with his supportive but aging grandparents -- and his grandparents on both sides of his family have both experienced much more, their travels and activism ("Every one of them had a story to tell about an era of major events") a contrast to his sedentary, easy life in a very stable society.
       Majnun is anything but atypical for his generation:
I don't know what I want to be, I can't find a job ... I spend my afternoons alone, dedicated to my inner world or on Twitter and Facebook. 
       With little experience, his perspective is limited:
The world was that which he read in history books and, above all, what he saw on the internet. 
       History is being made around him, too: the novel starts in January, 2011, and an ocean away the Arab Spring begins to take shape. But Majnun's engagement is less political than religious, as he considers converting to Islam, seeking out more information about it and wondering whether he can find what he is looking for in it. Almino uses this, in particular, to present considerable dialogue and debate about the nature and specifics of Islam -- though the emphasis is definitely on scope, not depth, with most of the debate at a rather superficial level.
       There's also Majnun's passion for Laila -- who is not only fifteen years his senior but is also married. Most of their relationship plays out at a distance, rather than in person; eventually, it also adds considerable drama to the story.
       Majnun does break free from his limited existence, first leaving his grandparents' home and then even venturing to Spain, where he is able to visit some of the sites of his dreams, including the Alhambra. His engagement with Islam -- as with most everything -- is earnest but shallow; he argues for and about it with the well-meaning enthusiasm, and the ignorance, of the adolescent.
       Enigmas of Spring is very aware of present-day history. Much of the debate surrounds the events of the unfolding Arab Spring, but also extends beyond that -- as Almino's main locales are Brazil and Spain -- and includes references to such works-of-the-moment as Stéphane Hessel's Time for Outrage ! The contrast to Granada under Islamic rule -- and the transition of the fifteenth century -- is a fairly effective and interesting one, even as Almino uses it only as one of perhaps too many tracks in the novel. Closing, after an intermission of a year and a half or so -- in June 2013, Almino ends the book in the middle of the (domestically significant) 2013 protests in Brazil, Majnun having embraced a more local activism -- but at least becoming active: "Carmen could no longer accuse him of preferring solitude".
       In many ways, Enigmas of Spring is a Bildungsroman, tracing Majnun's path to the beginnings of adulthood: independence, hopeless love, trying to find a place in the world, whether in religion or in the political. It is also suggested that Majnun becomes more of a writer: "All he'd experienced would end up as words", the novella in progress taking on a firmer shape.
       Enigmas of Spring immerses itself and its characters in the events of the (recent) day. The immediacy has its appeal -- it's good to see a writer tackle this head-on, almost in the moment -- but also poses difficulties; ultimately, Almino, and his very green protagonist, can only dig and go so deep.
       While impressive in many of its pieces -- both of the present and the distant past --, and with a surprisingly busy plot (including a carjacking that involves a dead dog, and a murder), Enigmas of Spring remains a bit thin. - M.A.Orthofer




João Almino, The Book of Emotions, Trans. by Elizabeth Jackson, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.


"In a future Brazil, a blind photographer considers his old photographs and, deprived of his sight, reconstructs his experiences.
Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions “a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera.” Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. João Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life."
"Nearing the end of his life in the year 2022, a blind Brazilian photographer, Cadu, revisits his past in Almino's tale of memory and regret. Cadu lives alone, haunted by the yearning for all the women he's loved and lost. His only remaining friends are Mauricio, the son of his late wife, and Carolina, his goddaughter whose mother he wished to seduce. With Mauricio and Carolina's help, he decides to create The Book of Emotions, a photo journal of his "incomplete, sentimental memories from a period in which [he] could see, and saw too much." Although he is blind, the photos of former friends, lovers, and enemies "reveal themselves in rich detail" in his mind, evoking powerful emotions from years past. The journal begins when his lover Joana leaves him for the wealthy politician Eduardo Kaufman. Cadu then moves to the capital city, Brasília, where he finds political corruption and chases a series of women, images of whom he captures for his exhibit of nude photographs and which epitomize his "instantaneous, fleeting and sometimes deceptive reality." Almino (The Five Seasons of Love) succeeds in capturing the essences of these photographs--loneliness and longing--through language, and readers will sympathize with the artist who never receives the love or respect he seeks and deserves." - Publishers Weekly


"I await each book by Joao Almino with the certainty of finding an intelligent surprise in its pages. And I never cease to be amazed.
He is virtually a unique narrator, who knows how to transmit profound ideas without letting them steal life from the substance of his stories...
Contrary to the flood of linear, verbose novels that have become the norm (influenced mainly by journalism), João Almino’s narrative races forward with leaps in the action. He doesn’t fill pages for the sake of filling them. He doesn’t speak too much. He doesn’t dwell on the unnecessary and is never predictable." - Alberto Ruy-Sanchez

"Brazil's capital city, Brasilia, conceived by modernist architect Lucio Costa, was built in the late 1950s on what had been an unpopulated desert. Costa envisioned a city in which urban design enabled the existence of an ideal society, a utopian notion that deflated when confronted with reality. Brasilia's once futuristic archways now slouch toward violent suburbs riddled with decay and corruption.
Novelist and former diplomat Joao Almino may be the poet laureate of Costa's failed vision. Disappointment flickers in the background of his novels, all of which deal with attempts by a shifting group of characters to live inside Brasilia's broken shell. Isolated by that city's architecture, Almino's characters wander its parks and stare across its artificial lakes, caught between hope and frustration, incompleteness and failure.
Almino's The Book of Emotions, newly translated by Elizabeth Jackson for Dalkey Archive Press, is narrated by Cadu, a photographer and onetime womanizer. First published in 2008 by Editora Record, it's set in an unspecified future. An existentialist in the manner of Clarice Lispecter, Almino writes from the confines of his narrator's consciousness in a blunt, unadorned prose. Almino's narrative style, in which elements of plot drift like smoke through a character's fragmented thoughts, has led Brazilian critics to cast Almino as heir to Machado de Assis. Indeed, in the The Book of Emotions, we find a dog named Quincas Borba, after Machado's novel of the same name.
When we meet him, Cadu is blind and living alone with his dog—this one named Marcella, after a former lover. At the suggestion of a friend, Cadu decides to reprise the photographic diary he kept after leaving Rio twenty years earlier and compose "a scrapbook of my incomplete, sentimental memories from a period in which I could see, and saw too much." Deprived of his eyesight, he constructs the book from memory, selecting photographs out of his digital archives with the help of his young assistant. Like the blind Cadu, we never see the photos, and are left with only his words to grasp their content. "Like the buttons on a radio that skip right to the stations with the best reception," Cadu writes, "my memory jumps to things that still make my heart beat." Cadu's photographic memoir (which he calls the Book of Emotions) is set within his diary of the present, an account of the monotonies of old age.
Cadu's Book of Emotions begins in Rio, opening on a photograph, taken from above, of a man getting into a car. It is, obliquely, a photo about Cadu's lover Joana, who has refused to marry him and left him for the corrupt politician in the picture. In response, Cadu flees to Brasilia, a city he sees sentimentally: "Brasilia aroused the rustic fields with green caresses. I rediscovered it in the sensual and audacious of wide-ranging poetry…" There, he reunites with Ana, a former flame, falls in love with another woman, Aida, and plots schemes for revenge against the politician. Meanwhile, events central to Almino's earlier novels—a suicide, a kidnapping, a murder—float past, set against the crime and violence of a de-modernizing, and disillusioning, Brasilia. As Cadu too finds his dreams frustrated, his loss of idealism pitches him into a struggle over whether art should represent reality.
"Through my photographs," Cadu writes, "I want to take possession of something just for myself. Like planting a flag in virgin territory." Though Cadu persists in thinking his dreams are as real as the politicians and slums of his documentary photographs, only the latter bring him any measure of success. In his frustration, he composes two series of photographs for an exhibition that documents what Cadu's brother describes as "an idea of the search for happiness." One is of women's pubic hair ordered by color, density, and shape; the other of flowers intended as an homage to the city. The exhibition, however, is a failure.
Almino's own photography, visible on his website, resembles Cadu's descriptions of his own. Almino's photos are evocative in their abstraction—the same can be said of this novel of invisible images. And like Brasilia, Cadu's "Book of Emotions" ends on a note of unfulfilled desire, a vacillation between hope and despair. The book's last photograph is an old, ethereal image of Joana. And although "every photograph is proof of a meeting," the blind photographer writes, it is also "an invisible window through which we see the object of our emotion." The Book of Emotions recreates this process: it builds a window through which we can watch the life and death of dreams." - Jenny Hendrix

"I don’t care much for politics, but given the nature of the race for the Republican nomination over the last couple of months, it has been difficult to keep away. Every morning I diligently listen to NPR and every afternoon I beam in The Rachel Maddow Show to get my daily dose of theatrics. But perhaps “theatrics” isn’t the right term; in the theater, you sit in your red plush seats and look up at the proscenium arch and see basically the same thing that everybody else sees. Such is the nature of linear perspective. But as has been made very clear, American politics does not have one, but two perspectives — I don’t dare say more — and one day, every good American must shunt off to their side. Similarly, The Media has its own set of perspectives and it shapes its images accordingly. What do they play on repeat, the candidate’s slip of the tongue or his rousing victory speech? Where do they stand when photographing a rally, in the crowd portraying excited supporters or at the back of the room, displaying the rows and rows of empty chairs?
It’s important to remember that where there’s an image, there’s a camera, and where there’s a camera, there’s an eye pressed to the viewfinder. At a time when it’s hard not to receive the images we are inundated with as facts — after all, photos can’t lie, can they? — The Book of Emotions by Brazilian novelist João Almino takes us into the life of Cadu, the man behind the camera.
The book opens with an act of near-defenestration. Cadu hangs out a window, photographing the tiny heads of people down below. The photograph he takes is mundane. If you were to look at it, you wouldn’t get overly excited. A typical crowd, figures heading into and out of the building, maybe a face lifted up towards his window. But it is this photo that is exemplary of all of Cadu’s work. He explains: “There are photographs that have only subjective value […] like that page of a diary that records what moved us deeply and whose dimensions only we understand.” It is only through knowing the story of how the photo came about, through standing, as it were, in the photographer’s shoes with an eye to the camera, or at least peering over his shoulder, that one gets just the right angle so that something glints, pushes out from the image. Suddenly, that upturned face is looking awfully familiar, and if there’s an emotion that it communicates, it’s not a good one.
Of course, you probably already know that there is only one emotion that leads photographers to list precariously out upper-story windows, and that emotion is jealousy. The single face in the crowd, we soon find out, belongs to one Eduardo Kaufman, politician, demagogue, and, Cadu suspects, his lover’s new lover. But despite his seething hatred for the man, Cadu, who once took some famous photographs of a Brazilian president, allows himself to be enlisted by Kaufman in a photojournalism project to help aid a congressional campaign. After all, money is money.
That is, reality is reality. It’s a phrase that Cadu borrows from Kaufman and which crops up again and again, a nagging tautology. What does it mean? What is reality? But of course, reality is the photograph of the blind man in abject poverty that Cadu encounters in the slums, ambivilating with guilt before throwing ethics to the wind. And reality is in the movie about gang warfare that his new girlfriend insists on seeing. Reality is the photograph that giveth power to the politician, and it is the photograph that taketh away. When “the entire world makes and remakes itself in movies and photographs,” reality is the image.
But there are other kinds of images too, and it is in these that Almino explores the vicissitudes of character, the moments that change lives but somehow, from the outside, go undetected. Reality is also the turned away face of Cadu’s godson, a missed opportunity, a photo taken a moment too late, it is empty bench where he ecstatically fantasizes taking a date, but then never does, it is the rag-tag family whose starched smiles hide the specter of cancer.
Cadu portrays his life as a book of photographs. But unlike the grand political narratives that serve as a backdrop to his day-to-day actions, veneers of structure and stability that should crumble like a house of cards but somehow don’t, these are fragments that tentatively hold together, like molecules of water, threatening to fly apart; a series of photographs signifying nothing. Almino’s novel is a retrospective, a looking back, but memory is not narrative and “photography is neither a part of a film nor a moment in a sequence of facts. It’s a time for reflection, observation, and discovery.” The photograph becomes, in The Book of Emotions, a moment of order when things take shape. Cadu’s life is not a narrative arc, the muscle-straining climb up one face and slow descent down the other, but the coalescing of images when “the pieces of the chaos fit together perfectly, giving meaning to the universe.”
Behind the camera, Cadu plays all of the roles; the enterprising photojournalist, the lurid male gazer collecting female bodies, the lover of flowers and landscapes, the designated capturer of family moments. But in the end, Cadu’s eyes fail and his blindness forces him to come out from behind the camera. It is here, without barrier, that he can overcome the sense of sight in return for the sense of feeling; there he is, an old man, flipping through the pages of his photo album, his book of emotions, returning again and again to the details, to the moments that have passed but not been exhausted." - Jesse Miller

João Almino, The Five Seasons of Love, Trans. by Elizabeth Jackson, Host Publications, 2008.


"This is a novel of novels, a novel about love and its different seasons, about friendship and its complicities, but also a political novel—both in the sense that 'what is personal is political' and in the sense that it speaks, in a subtle and sober way, about the stages of repression and silencing, of fear and disappearances." - Sandra Lorenzano

"A book that is funny, malicious, creative, full of formal innovations and intellectually young. In short a contemporary novel." - Ledo Ivo

"In The Five Seasons of Love, acclaimed Brazilian writer João Almino presents a compelling and sympathetic portrait of a woman whose life has not turned out as she anticipated, and whose once audacious dreams have been replaced by half-truths, failures, and frustration. To fulfill a pact made during her student days, fifty-five-year-old Ana Kauffman plans a party to celebrate the new millennium. As old friends resurface and the countdown to the new century draws near, Ana's past undergoes a series of unexpected revisions—beginning with the arrival of Berta, the newly minted post-op persona of Ana's former boyfriend Norberto. Set amidst the chaos of contemporary Brasilia, a place where even the most basic human affairs—love, friendship, sex, and work—can take unlikely shapes, Ana's story is both relentlessly modern and profoundly timeless. Winner of the Casa de las Americas 2003 Literary Award, The Five Seasons of Love is an extraordinary novel by a writer at the height of his powers.
This is a novel of intensities, of passionate encounters, both for the narrator and the reader; of places that you will recognize, enjoy, and sometimes even begin to hate, although you may have never seen them. Above all, this is a novel of the certainty that pervades all passion and all places, the certainty that Love, could it ever be achieved at all, or endure forever, would be the redemption and perhaps even the transfiguration of our existence.
Seen from these "Five Seasons of Love," João Almino's trajectory as a novelist seems to convey, in a compressed version, the history of the novel over the past century: having gone through many levels of formal experimentation, having engaged in multiple strategies to productively provoke his readers, he is now a powerful presence in what we might call the 'existentialist turn' of the genre.
This novel is about the 'World' again, about the defining impossibility of women and men to find a stable place in the World; and it does so with tones and in colors that are neither loud nor bitter. If you manage to read João Almino sympathetically, if you are able to engage with the existence of Ana, his beautiful protagonist and narrator, then this novel will convince you that we must live - and should try to live happily - with the minimal opportunities that each individual life has to offer." - Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

"João Almino’s The Five Seasons of Love courageously portrays the physical, albeit imaginary, trope of Brasília as a site of transformation in every sense of the word. The Five Seasons of Love is a novel where characters embark on transitions that transcend the prison of the past to arrive at new beginnings and personal renewal. Through these pages, the reader is treated to the dynamics of transformative movement on all levels humanly possible: the geographic, the societal, the political, the psychological, the emotional, the spiritual, and even the sexual. This is a novel that movingly and compellingly illustrates a theory of the ‘‘trans’’ in formation.
Clearly, João Almino’s third novel in his brilliant trilogy about Brasília is also about love in its various manifestations: love of Brasília itself, the love among partners morphing into friendship at best or apathy at worst, love of the complex multiplicity and layering of characters as they are introduced and developed throughout the course of the narrative, even the love of the comfort of skepticism, and a dormant love longing for regeneration.
It is no accident that Almino’s longest chapter is his first: ‘‘Adventures of Solitude.’’ For the novel’s narrator-protagonist, Ana, a middle-aged, retired university professor, solitude isolates her from love yet forms a necessary space to stimulate self-knowledge. Almino skillfully portrays a ‘‘feminine’’ solitude, if such a universal emotion can possibly be gendered, owing a debt to the intimist existential reflections of one of Brazil’s greatest novelists, Clarice Lispector. Out of Ana’s solitude come transformative philosophical constructs constantly under revision.
In this meta-textual universe, the creative process itself, the invention and usefulness (or uselessness, as it were) of language, of words, becomes a character as central as Ana or the city with which she maintains a conflicted love-hate relationship. An obsessively anguished search for words results in cynicism, monotony and loneliness, but also in selfdestruction and rebirth.
The remaining chapters are devoted to articulating love as a lived experience from the perspective of an intellectual, self-conscious narrator.
The second chapter, ‘‘Love, That Word,’’ resonates with both a critical questioning of the ideals of love and the jaded, rather Machadian pessimism that such intense examination inevitably produces. Chapter Three, ‘‘Love’s Labyrinths,’’ is a clear articulation of the contradictions inherent in love that changes and in loving other characters who change, thus plunging the main character into flux, experiencing the mutability of love: an ex-husband, with whom love has clearly turned to hate; a dear friend whose sexual reassignment surgery causes doubts about how to love the re-born friend in her new identity; explicitly erotic love that awakens new feelings in Ana, but not without the internalized struggle of relentlessly critical self-examination before moving toward any sense of sexual liberation.
Chapter Four’s ‘‘Suicidal Passions’’ oscillates between treatment of the erotic impulse as self-destructive and the restorative effects that erotic love has in nurturing Ana’s cultivation of self-love, intersecting with a newfound sensation of love. It is unclear whether Chapter Five, ‘‘The Last Season of Love,’’ moves the reader into the dead of winter or to rejoice in the spring of regeneration. Self-destruction and rebirth, while seemingly at opposite ends of the philosophical pendulum, are both refreshingly and tragically dependent on each other for their existence.
Nevertheless, Ana is far more complex a character than such a schematic description might suggest. Almino beautifully sustains the transformation motif throughout the entire novel. Most explicitly, Norberto’s transition to Berta, a male-to-female transgender character, plays a fundamental role in Ana’s own psychosocial development. While it does not happen often, the moments where Ana gives life to her alter ego, Diana, are among the most poignant in the novel, and are given their full development only at the story’s end. The narrator-protagonist reflects on this relationship: ‘‘Diana guides me. She loosens my tied tongue, releases my speech in the ink of this anxious pen. She is determined, arbitrary. She hates silence. She lives in the noise of the world, the opposite of me.’’ As if she were the victim of multiple personality disorder or, more likely, nurturing a Pessoa-like heteronym, Ana’s existential journey only bears fruit when she is ultimately able to reconcile Diana with Ana. Almino’s choice of name is brilliant. Semiotically, (Di)Ana denotes the idea of dyad, dichotomy, even duality. An enthusiastic reader may go so far as to associate the ‘‘Di’’ of ‘‘Diana’’ with the verb ‘‘to die.’’ Metaphorically, for the character’s psychological transformation to take place, Ana must die for her existence to be penetrated by Diana, rescuing her former self from a futile and mediocre existence." - Steven F. Butterman

"The Five Seasons of Love, the final volume in the Brasilia Trilogy by Brazilian diplomat João Almino, highlights this novelist’s fervent stance towards the writer’s craft. First, it is the most realist of the three, the most substantive, a sign that for Almino the act of writing leads to the essential and focuses on existing things. Second, because it is the most despairing novel in the trilogy, no doubt an indication of Almino’s maturity and his focus on achieving what he himself defines as "literature against illusion".
In Almino’s case, turning back to realism is not a return to the past or an adherence to the confines of conservative writing, but an unconditional wager on the present, in which Brasilia, the capital built for the future, appears as a crumbling belief.
In Ideas on Where to Spend the End of the World (1986), the first novel in the Trilogy, the narrator is a dead man, a ghost who returns to Earth to finish an unfinished quest, and who reincarnates in each of the characters during the process. In the second, Samba-Enredo (1994), the narrator is a machine, a computer – an impersonal I, neither first nor third person, much closer to an indifferent (yet irrepressible) revelation than to a confession.
And now Almino "incarnates" in a woman, Ana Kauffmann, damaged goods, a sad narrator, determined to gather together the pieces of her shattered illusions. With the conclusion of the Trilogy, a dead man, a machine, and a woman have occupied the place of the masculine “I” – I, João Almino, the writer – not merely repressed; rather, virtually expelled from the accounts.
The first book, more surreal, tells the story of a settling of accounts. The second, on a more allegorical note, narrates a kidnapping during Carnival. And now The Five Seasons of Love, unlike its two predecessors, dwells on the banal elements in the lives of common people (the most predictable of which is love). The novel’s subject matter is thus incompleteness, frustration, failure, half-truths, mistakes – in a word, everything we call reality. That is, disillusionment.
Myths – Almino takes a courageous stand in a field like literature, in which, since the time of the first myths, everything has always pointed to imagination and lies. Hence emerges this novel’s beauty, through a tough, masculine writing (although incarnate in a woman’s voice). As usual, the backdrop is Brasilia, itself an incomplete, fractured, frustrated city – conceived for perfection in the shapes created by Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, but impelled ineluctably by reality towards a painful scenario of dreary suburbs, dissatisfied bureaucrats, opportunists, urban chaos, and despair.
A frustrated project, like all human projects, since in order for us to act, our point of departure is always some utopia. But the utopia is always this: a project that never comes to fruition, something that always falls short of itself. The utopia may serve as the driving force for the dream (Brasilia in the shape of an airplane, soaring over Brazil’s Central Plateau), but that’s all: just the dream, because reality always offers us something else.
Brasilia, a scenario created in praise of the future, spawns a present-day that Ana experiences as depressive, even devastating. In this sense João Almino’s writing is contemporary; with no illusions, merciless towards utopias and facile dreams, Almino writes not as a portrait artist attempting to reproduce (and thereby celebrate) reality, but as an executioner who tramples on reality, then rubs our faces in the dirt.
It has already been said that Almino uses pessimism as a method. Ana Kauffmann, the narrator, is in fact a powerless woman whose chosen paths have always led her to untimely destinations, who wanted one thing and got another, and who feels like a puppet in fate’s hands. And she is a daughter of the so-called ’68 generation, who believed in political utopias, in the vanguards, in the armed struggle, in sexual liberation, but who now has to deal with neoliberalism, pedantry, apathy, and AIDS. Throughout the book, although suspicious and melancholic, she strives to put the broken pieces back together, since she has nothing else to live for.
Diplomacy – When he was named to head the Rio Branco Institute in Brasilia, João Almino maintained a clear-cut separation between his diplomatic work and his literary career – as did other Brazilian writer-diplomats like João Cabral and Vinicius de Moraes. He kept the two separate, but something persisted. As a diplomat, the writer João Almino also knows how to keep a distance, to see without believing too quickly, to weigh what he sees and treat the flaws with counterweights – and perhaps this explains why his Ana is so human.
She feels attraction and repulsion for the country in which she lives, for the life she has lived and whose wounds have still not healed, for the future expressed in the Brasilia of Juscelino Kubitschek; a future that never came, or came as the opposite, expressed as a city-tomb, of marble, empty avenues, and huge façades, lurching forward even as reality drags it back.
In fact, Almino’s Brasilia is not only a modern city, but a metaphor for the modern world. A city of migrants, towards which all of Brazil once converged but from which it now flees, a city-synthesis in a world where synthesis has been replaced by fragmentation. A city where the most elementary human affairs, like sex, love, friendship, and work, take strange shapes - sometimes unacceptable, often unbelievable.
Narrator Ana Kauffmann had already appeared in the second novel, Samba-Enredo, and Paulinho is the same Paulo Antônio from the first novel. The roots of the books thus intertwine, but they are independent and can be read separately. The Five Seasons of Love speaks of this fifth season, nonexistent. It is neither the sum nor the negation of the other four. And perhaps it is literature’s place (that which Guimarães Rosa called "The Third Bank of the River"), a place not of illusion, but rather, as some vigorous writers like Almino suggest, of disillusionment." - José Castello

"The great cities of the world have a special relationship firmly established with the modern narrative. World cities have been brought to life by classic narratives vitally related to what distinguishes them, especially the great European capitals, whether Dublin’s Joyce, Prague’s Kafka, Paris’s Proust, Berlin’s Doblin, or London’s Woolf. The Tate Modern’s current exhibition “Global Cities” (2007) expands far beyond Europe to include the largest and most dynamic cities on all continents. Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country in area, has seen rapid urbanization, and its capital, Brasília, seems to have literally materialized out of nothing on the country’s central plateau, without any literature and only a series of notes in the historical record.
When Brasília was inaugurated on April 21, 1960 the city was the most audaciously futuristic ever designed and constructed as a national capital. There were no inhabitants and no roads. It could only be reached by airplane, and its palaces, ministries, and “superblocks” of residences seemed as strange as a brave new world. It was designed in the shape of a cross, or some say an airplane, and all its streets were one-way with no intersections. Street lamps used fluorescent lighting. In that same year, Simone de Beauvoir found Brasília to be an artificial city in the middle of a desert; she wrote about the recently inaugurated capital, "I'm leaving Brasília with the greatest pleasure... this city will never have a soul, heart, flesh or blood."[1] One of Brazil's greatest writers, Clarice Lispector, was already fascinated by the city in 1962 when she wrote: "Brasília is artificial, as artificial as the world must have been when it was created... Construction with space calculated for clouds."
The architect Oscar Niemeyer's "Statement" about planning the city shows that function gave rise to form. It was a project of high modernism, and function was primarily aesthetic and symbolic: useful structures would be capable of transmitting "beauty and emotion" permanently. Niemeyer described the challenge he faced as being the need to reconcile total freedom for the imagination with a unique character for both buildings and the overall design. Yet his novel design disguises within Brasília's radical futurism the ghost of great world cities and their designs and development in history: the High Court was meant to have the "sobriety of the great squares of Europe" and the great concave and convex chambers of the National Congress were meant to realize Le Corbusier's ideal of "correct and magnificent volumes assembled in light." In his book on the city in history, Lewis Mumford cites one of the vulnerabilities of the planned city, from Versailles to Washington, D.C., Canberra to Chandigarh, which is form without function. Whether composed of monumental Baroque façades, broad avenues, or geometrical designs, the planned city is not designed to change over time. It is the material realization of a pure idea, an architectural concept in which the useful or practical is a function of esthetic design and form.
Brasília, the futuristic capital city of Brazil, was officially opened by President Juscelino Kubitschek when it could be reached only by air or horseback. Brasília thus began its still brief existence as a paradox. It was planned as a vanguard of modern architecture where form and functionality would recast political and urban life in a planned and controlled space of aesthetic grandeur, where the individual would be minimized by the spatial grandiosity and the open horizons of the central plateau. Brasília opened as the mythical city of the New World, absent any human or social character, a space without any narrative of its own, as unoccupied as blank pages waiting for characteristic inscriptions that would in time allow it to join the other great capitals with a narrative space of its own. Its mythical dimension allowed André Malraux to see in it already “a resurrection of the architectural lyricism born in the Hellenic world,” and he called it “the capital of hope.” It seemed to him the “first capital of a new civilization” and “the most audacious city the West ever conceived.”
Brasília in its futuristic incarnation of 1960 was the ghostly presence and unfulfilled form of a long-standing architectonic and geo-utopian dream of a capital city in the interior, and author João Almino reviews the notable historical references to a long-nurtured desire to build a new capital in the interior in a retrospective essay. In the early nineteenth century, both the independence movement in Minas Gerais and the 1817 revolutionaries in Pernambuco defended the idea of establishing a national capital in the interior on the central plateau. Nationalist politician Hipólito José da Costa, exiled in London in 1808, placed the future capital at the head of great rivers in the interior, whereas the actual placement of Brasília would correspond by an uncanny coincidence with a suggestion of José Bonifácio de Andrade e Silva in 1821, before the declaration of independence, that the future capital be located at approximately fifteen degrees latitude and that it be called "Petrópole, Brasília or some other name." The historian and diplomat Francisco Varnhagen suggested in 1849 that countries with capital cities in the interior have greater culture, wealth, and population through the promotion of communication, commerce, agriculture, and industry. According to Tomás Coelho in 1877, a capital on the high plain would represent a locus of authority from which orders would "descend," irradiating to the far corners of Brazil. Legal proposals to move the capital began in 1852 and continued through the constitutions of 1891, 1934, and 1946, followed by technical studies for its precise location. A foundation stone to mark a possible location of the future capital was laid on September 7, 1922, on the centenary of Brazil’s independence. The definitive location was chosen on April 15, 1955, and during construction the stone from 1922 was located within the actual Federal District.
Brazil's great author Machado de Assis, in a newspaper column on January 22, 1893, saw the inevitability of a new capital and expressed his hope that it would gain its own population right away and that it would be habitable. Here the great writer put his finger on perhaps the main and most persistent doubt that is still present in the Brazilian mind as regards Brasília: who are the permanent residents and how do they survive in an artificial city? Perhaps referring to the strangeness of Brasília and its bizarre politics, a São Paulo newspaper cartoon (July 6, 2007) jokes that anyone in Brasília who is not already from outer space must have been abducted.
The Utopian city, once inaugurated, had to face reality, and its futuristic spaces and designs were suddenly filled with all the problems of Brazilian society, as the influx of population began to change the design and uses of the city. There was a confrontation between architectural order and civic chaos, between bureaucracy and democracy in the daily life that sprang up, seemingly irrationally, in the few public spaces and sidewalks. Nature had been reinvented in Brasília, so that everyday activities, such as visiting the supermarket, became noble architectural excursions. Because the wide horizons and open spaces reduced the sense and image of human occupation, the city filled with migrants whose identity now became uncertain, open, and multiple. There was neither past nor future, only imagination and change. In daily life, however, citizens were obliged to face the high levels of violence, poverty, and instability that are the realities of urban Brazil. They lived lives in transition, in search of new identities to match the futuristic environment: either they would find a way to survive the city, or it would consume them, obliging them to return to their place of origin.
João Almino holds the rank of ambassador in the Brazilian diplomatic corps, Itamaraty, which is housed in one of the architectural gems of Brasília. Almino was, like everyone else, a newcomer to the capital. His novels set in Brasília are the first narratives to portray new residents of the city, adjusting to a different life in a futuristic setting. The novel As cinco estações do amor (“The Five Seasons of Love,” 2001) is his third, after Samba-enredo (“Theme-Samba,” 1994) and Idéias para onde passar o fim do mundo (“Ideas for Where to Spend the End of the World,”1987). The three novels, whose characters embody the experience of life in Brasília, have precedents in Brazilian urban literature. Almino’s narrator Ana, who looks out over Brasília’s Lake Paranoá, has been considered a companion to Machado de Assis’ characters Brás Cubas, in Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, or Rubião in Quincas Borba, who contemplate the Bay of Botafogo from their city residences. The influence of Portuguese realist Eça de Queirós has been seen in his circle of intellectuals and writers who were alienated from the bourgeois society of their time. In twentieth-century Brazil, Almino’s novel finds a parallel in Oswald de Andrade’s portrait of the modernist city of São Paulo in 1922, with its psychological portrait of the character Alma, who struggles in urban depths of passions and betrayals. Almino’s Ana also brings to mind Clarice Lispector’s heroines, who are existentially alienated from their useless, bourgeois lives as housewives in mid-century Rio de Janeiro. In Almino’s Brasília, coming of age from the 1960s to the next turn of the century, urban characters continue to interact with the capital’s idiosyncrasies, fighting to avoid meaninglessness and artificiality in their new lives. The group of friends in the novel, whose lives scatter and change unpredictably, call themselves “The Useless Ones.” Ana’s narrative weaves together the personal stories of these characters, who feel rootless and alienated in the futuristic environment. The Five Seasons of Love is a novel about change, adaptation, and survival under unexpected and strange circumstances.
Brasília the city is ever present, underlying the stories of the characters in The Five Seasons of Love. They live by the forms, spaces, and circumstances of the city around them, in which Utopian design confronts the demands of a growing population and the dynamics of contemporary urban life imported into the awaiting buildings and avenues. Change, whether social, personal, or political, marks the lives of all the characters. Personal change dominates the narration by a young woman who came to Brasília from a small town in Minas Gerais. Throughout her narrative, Ana is sorting and throwing out papers from her former life, which remind her of her ex-husband Eduardo, as she searches for a self that has been lost in the dissolution of the marriage and in her solitary life as a retired university professor. By ridding herself of accumulated papers, she symbolically erases all memory of the past, which she plans to recreate on blank pages, which are Brasília. Only the present moment holds together the stories of all the other characters, especially the “Useless Ones,” her educated friends who meet in a local restaurant and bar.
Brasília’s empty newness abolishes historical and personal memory. Change is already present in Ana’s psychology in an alter–ego, the bold, confident, and assertive Diana, who may suddenly appear at any time. When she is Ana, however, she discards her previous identity, tries to be like the new city she has adopted by starting over, and empties out her previous life of its commitments and emotions:
For an instant I still recall the adventure that brought me to the Central Plateau, as if to fulfill a mission. It occurs to me that from the beginning the monumental structure of Brasília defined the limits of that adventure of mine. Brasília is the heavy streaks of rain on the window, the noisy cars passing, the loneliness of a big city, death, unrequited love, anguish…
The city propels Ana into the future and makes her believe that the only possible view of life is instantaneism, “the acceleration of time doesn’t allow us any option,” she comments. When she looks at the horizon she witnesses what Lispector saw as calculated space, a Magritte transparency in surface reality:
Everything in Brasília can be seen at a glance. In the clear skies and generous light, one’s eyes see not just the horizon in the distance but also the dividing line between the city and the country. Predictable layout, expected curves. Behind this wide-open light and the evidence of what is planned, a mystery nevertheless persists.
When she goes out, the cityscape signals to her, monumentalizing the anonymity and emptiness she feels inside:
I take Monument Avenue. Ahead of me, the neon quadrilateral at the National Shopping Center is lit. The red in the ads appears to continue into the sky. Across the crimson horizon the clouds trace spiral figures in smoke. Right in the center, an enormous reddish-gray question mark. In the middle of the sky and my life. A passing foreboding, that comes to me as a distraction...
It is the autumn of the flowering quaresmas; in the still-green trees and grass. The clouds may unload more rain at any moment. But soon the long dry winter should begin; dreaded by all, except me, because the dryness agrees with my temperament, just like these empty vistas, punctuated by figures that crisscross them like little lost ants…



By the end of its first decade of existence, Brasília is already suffocating from the poverty and pressure of the eighteen satellite cities surrounding it and from the military dictatorship running the country. The satellite cities of Taguatinga and Ceilândia reach more than double the population of the capital, while Gama, Sobradinho, Planaltina, Guará, and Samambaia each pass the 100,000 mark by the 1990s. Examples of decay, crime, and change fill the streets and Ana’s narrative. All new arrivals are viewed with suspicion. Ana’s apartment is assaulted by thieves, perhaps involved with her cook’s son. Her friends in the club of “The Useless Ones” have nearly all left the city. When Helena left to join a revolutionary group in the interior, security agents searched for her in Ana’s apartment. Joana married a Rio entrepreneur and became a society matron when the rest of the Useless were still dressing like hippies. Norberto, a former boyfriend, left for San Francisco and returned as a woman to share Ana’s house; the change of sex surprised Ana, and was not without its humorous side as she watched “Berta” awkwardly learn feminine ways. New political, psychological, and sexual identities belong in Brasília.
Brasília’s pure modernity is strong in material and spirit, however, in spite of the social problems imposed on it, and is capable of offering a resurrection, as Malraux perceived, through the lyricism of its forms. Its new residents can discover and partake of this redeeming quality. Ana must discover the inner strength emanating from the city by a questioning and analysis of herself and the world around her through her narrative; she holds forth with the social world of friends, domestic servants, household pets, while continuing to discard her past and search for a fundamental point of new beginnings:
My youth is lost. The Brasília of my dream of the future is dead. I recognize myself in the façades of its prematurely old buildings, in its unstable and decadent modernity… I have no desire to leave Brasília, or even leave the house. I don’t need to. From here I see everything, feel everything, though it may be from the inside of the bell jar that I created to preserve my discretionary space. It’s quite true that there is no difference between remaining locked up here or in Taimbé. I have this view over the Paranoá Lake, but I prefer to see nature on television. Perhaps I have gone crazy, this is how I live. I don’t need to move. I don’t want to see anyone. I lock myself in with my memories… I want to capture the moment, to start from zero. Without any baggage from the past. Without history, without direction.
The empty depths of Brasília’s vast spaces and horizon miniaturize Ana into just another lost ant on the vast plateau; she sets fire to her papers and attempts suicide, in the abstract anonymous emptiness of form without content:
A terrible black vision of the world surrounds me. I have been devoured by life. I am the most miserable of creatures. A black slave. A destitute and mistreated woman. A street urchin. Landless. A dying Jane Doe in a charity hospital. An unknown pauper’s body left to a teaching hospital, then dissected in an anatomy class.
The vigilance and caring of Ana’s neighbor, Carlos, however, saves her life and offers her hope in the security of a changed identity that enables her to begin life again in the artificial city. Others are not so fortunate, however: Helena never returns from the guerilla insurgency at Araguaia, and Berta, formerly Norberto, who takes her identity cards, is murdered in a hate crime. For Ana, a few weeks back in her hometown, Taimbé, are enough to convince her that her life and the new city’s are now inseparable, and her only imperative is to accept the moment and live again. She accepts that personal change and new beginnings are possible, although at great cost, even in a futuristic city:
In the Pilot Plan, roots take flight and beat their wings like butterflies. Who can guarantee that I am not artificial like Brasília? Taimbé is here, in my meeting Carlos. Minas is on the terrace of this house where Carlos and I are small town lovers. Where we are matters more than where we are going, or whence we have come. … I have to rid myself of this weight, to begin the new century.
Ana’s narrative tribulations are the basis for re-education in the life she must lead on her own in the futuristic city. She must learn to overcome the weaknesses of Brasília’s Utopian, ultramodern design and vast spaces: form without substance, function versus pure idea, grandeur against intimacy. She has struggled with the urgency to create a new authenticity out of an almost metaphysical artificiality, and her narrative recapitulates the challenge facing migrants to the world’s new global cities, a bet on life and the power to renew ourselves:
Building a city from nothing is a bet on life. I want to live on the frontier that advances across the immense emptiness. To rebuild myself out of the ashes.
The Five Seasons of Love is a narrative for Brasília, the city, and the coming of age of its new citizens. Almino’s novel of change, suffering, sacrifice, and adaptation answers the question everyone asked about a city built without inhabitants: how can anyone live there? It carries the once futuristic city across the millennium after four decades and tells the epic, mythical story of a first generation who had to learn how to live in it, starting from the vast emptiness and the centuries-old appeal of the central plateau." - K. David Jackson

"The novel “As cinco estações do amor” ["The Five Seasons of Love"] starts with an imperative, which, had it not been instantaneous, would have caused the reader to stop and meditate after the two sharp, decided words had been firmly pronounced: “Tudo começa”. However, the impossibility of the absolute start is not realized until the words have been left behind, taken by the speed of the words that follow them, and the reader realizes that this is not the genesis of the world, a miraculous birth or a tragic death. It is an arbitrary instant, distinguished from all other instants precisely because these two words have been said. Ana’s search for beginnings is tangled in the concept of autonomous creation. There was the page, and “let there be a start”.
However unlikely absolute newness might be, “As cinco estações do amor” acknowledges the fact that Ana, its protagonist, is fascinated, obsessed by it. Her search is deepened and reflected by the settings in which she is placed: a city built out of thought and sweat, a vision of immensity that materializes possibilities of the will. It is understandable that our heroine would not hesitate to try to reinvent herself. “Brasília era ‘a cidade moderna e o futuro do mundo’, como papai dizia... O Plano Piloto não era bem uma cidade. Era uma idéia – idéia de moderno, de futuro, minha idéia de Brasil.” (17) Brasília’s great merit was to provide the country with a vision that was ideologically flexible and adaptable to different causes by its ambiguity of interpretation and abundance of symbolism.
Recognizing that perhaps the conquering of the sky was doomed by Babel’s ruins, Brasília struggles to conquer land instead – transforming nature, finding the center of the country, from where its message of revolution will irradiate to Brazil. Men will subdue the land. The country will rise to its development and direct its efforts to concrete results. But the city was not just an idea, or a statement. It was also a palpable chance of economic development. Individually, the construction of Brasília was a possibility of reconstruction for the self. “Para mim era como pular um muro para cair no coração do país, um coração que batia como o meu. Com a forma de borboleta que Lúcio Costa lhe deu, Brasília era um ponto livre no espaço vazio, com direito de voar e crescer para qualquer lado.” (17) The appeal of conquering the land is a long-present fascination in the Brazilian imaginary. The Bandeirantes, fearless explorers and mercenaries, were the first to expand the frontiers of the country and establish a territory beyond borders, fascinated by the immensity of the land. The expeditions for natural riches, were central to a mentality that still furthers the dream of gold and diamonds in unexplored forests, and the current economic development of Northern states of Brasil, like Rondônia and Acre.
In addition to expansion and exploration, the notion of limitless movement might be the first temptation to a people who has been crafted out of the wavings of the sea and the curvings of the road: Brazil’s demography is the result of innumerable episodes of immigration and migration. Ana comes from Minas Gerais, entering Brasília with the same openness of its avenues and plazas. Ana sees Brasília shaped like a butterfly, symbol of lightness, grace and whimsical freedom. But this view is her rendering of a city coated with her idealism. Costa projected the city in the shape of a plane – as if the modern message had not been clearly spelled out by the symmetrical lines and curves of concrete, dyed with the ocher of the ground, refusing to remain statically gray.
The relationship of Ana and Brasília is fascinatingly self-absorbing. The woman shapes the city with her eyes and her senses; but while Brasília is to some extent a projection of Ana, Ana is a transmutation of the city, a verb that became concrete that became wings that became heart.
The idea of beginnings is imbedded in the dream of creation. Raised out of the dust of the Planalto Central, Brasília is the culmination of the dream of divine materialization. Out of the formless and void expanses of dry land, there was light:
Cidade nova, vida nova. Na chegada, de noite, meus olhos brilhavam para um tapete salpicado de luzinhas enfileiradas que se espelhavam como raios em todas as direções. Aquelas chamas de mistério e esperança piscavam para mim. Sua beleza assombrosa me dava um frio na barriga. Assim cheguei a Brasília, com a ilusão de aventura e liberdade.(17)
The beauty that Ana sees in this first encounter with Brasília is filled with contrasts: the tiny lights in the expansive darkness, symbols of mystery and hope, the haunting beauty, which frightens and captivates with its "paisagens vazias, pontuadas por figuras que as cruzam, como formiguinhas perdidas.” (14) The scale of the city endows its inhabitants with a relative smallness that can be overwhelming. Again, a place of opposites: its magnitude is at the same time a tribute to human achievements, and a reminder of the creature’s minuteness in the universe. In Brasília, the flatness of the land causes the horizon to spring from the ground, in a 180° arch of translucent blue. However, while others might be overpowered by the limitless skies and the surrealism of the smooth land, Ana is not intimidated. The dryness of the earth, follows the texture of her spirit: “Mas em breve devem começar o longo inverno seco, que todo mundo aqui teme, menos eu, pois a secura é do meu temperamento” (17). Out of the dust, she intends to write a new story.
It is necessary to start from a thought; just as the city was created out of the void. Ana decides to burn all of the papers that she has accumulated for more than 30 years, her lost loves, her unfulfilled dreams, her tears and her laughs. The renewed story will rise with new words and meanings. But the words that will replace the first narratives will not retell the same stories. The past will be reconstructed from the vantage point of the present, with added cohesiveness and interconnectedness. Ana’s revisionist project seeks to find her ocean in Brasília – not the coast, denied to the candangos, but the sense of adventure and freedom that filled her soul upon arrival. In Brasília, she found paradise and exile. The repressive military reality, her panic of the police, frustrated loves and lost friends were crucial experiences for her discovery of good and evil, and now threaten to suffocate her ideals of youth.
João Almino does not leave many foundations for Ana. She needs to build her ideology from scratch. From the initial group of her early years, her center of intellectual exploration, Eva, the Philosopher and Helena die, in a symbolic destruction of the pillars of the West. Modernity will initiate a new thought, devoid of the boundaries of tradition, religion or philosophy.
Helena is the first to leave. Reminiscent of the immortal pages of Homer, she also refuses to die in Ana’s imaginary. There is a stubborn insistence on keeping her alive, in imagining her return, to restore the flame of old beliefs. The return of Helena would be a revolution, a reencounter with political values, a revival of principles worth fighting for.
The classical ideals of an Ancient West, the morals and ethics of honor and glory that directed the efforts of men and gods, advocating the possibility of a semi-divine existence, were assimilated by the ages. As Helena, these aspirations are dormant in the corners of a modern quest for meaning in the relative. Ana nourishes a hope that something will enrapture her: “espero em suma, que uma nova paixão – cega, surpreendente e radical como toda paixão – me arrebate. É a revolução que aguardo.”(40) She awaits the return of a lost time, irretrievable. “Sobretudo faltou a elevação, a epifania, que ultrapassasse a banalidade do cotidiano, nos remetesse ao encontro mágico de trinta anos atrás e nos fizesse recordar que um novo milênio começava.” (157) Ana’s expects not simply to remember, but she longs to relive the magical days of passions and convictions. Interestingly, the ability to comprehend the fullness of the days that are gone, would enable her to better see the possibilities of the future. The construction of a new ideology needs the foundational strength of what is gone.
Having lost Helena, Ana is now confronted with the suicide of Eva. “Se suicidou por excesso de vitalidade. Não estava à altura das ilusões que se fez” (30). Eve aspired becoming like god, and was sent out of paradise, losing her ties of direct fellowship with divinity. The loss of religiosity makes Ana insecure in her work as an educator for her nephew and niece. The high aspiring values of religion, the notions of moral, honor, dignity and duty are not part of Ana’s contemporary teaching. “Cresci com educação religiosa, com preceitos que depois deixei de acreditar… Às vezes invoco o espírito de papai, mas, não tendo a mesma religiosidade, sendo cética e pessimista, o que posso ensinar a meus sobrinhos?” (37) None of the spirits that are gone can return to help her; her own longs for their comfort, but firmly maintains its incredulous disposition. There might be a god, but only for those who believe. But while Ana claims her pessimistic and skeptic inclination, there is a desire to be embraced by the ease afforded by an environment with no contradictory functions of living, no clashes between pleasure and spirituality. It is almost a sadistic desire of self-denial but also self-absorption. Ana seeks to escape choices by closing herself off, in a fantasy state, being isolated from the rest of society under the veil of religious protection, but not for divine devotion.
Relendo esta página, penso que estaria mais tranquila se tivesse crescido num ambiente ascético, em vez de ter me deixado sucumbir a uma visão hedonista que considerava insuficiente todo prazer. E passa por minha cabeça a idéia de abandonar todos os meus bens materiais, os amigos e a ambição de prazer, e me retirar para algum convento. Poderia ser uma boa monja. Como nos mosteiros medievais, poderia dedicar o resto da minha vida a uma tarefa meticulosa e perfeita, neste caso a destruição do resto dos papéis e a conclusão do livro definitivo. (165)
Abandoning her social responsibilities, she would immerse herself completely in the project of finding the words to define her existence. Words carry the essence of the divine. If only she could pronounce the right ones, not only would the instants become fixed in time, but perhaps even past mistakes could be reinvented. “Serei, então, capaz de descobrir antipalavras, que desdigam ou engulam as palavras acumuladas. Não sou a própria essência da inutilidade?” (108) Ana’s self-destructive fantasies also acquire victimizing facets. She is the personification of the “essence of uselessness”, with a supposedly futile metaphysical existence (assessed by her spirit of pessimism and fatality). She is also the coming together of all the physical pains of the world – when enraptured in her vision of disaster, and her description of herself as “o mais miserável dos seres” (110), she claims “sofro por todos os desgraçados do mundo” (110). But these are all realities of a physical miserable existence; a slave, a homeless child, a landless man, an unidentified body. Try as she may to proclaim a purely transcendental character, she cannot disconnect herself from her physical reality. Loves of self and of divinity become irreconcilable poles, for she has experienced Brasília, a city that as any other terrestrial city, “foi feita pelo amor de si próprio em detrimento de Deus.” (170) Ana loves Brasília too deeply to carry out a plan of isolation and even her return home, proves to be a failure. Ana is in the city.
The Philosopher is also dead. And with him, all philosophies are reduced to ashes. “No meu quarto, tropeço num grupo de filósofos, caído das caixas carbonizadas, desfazendo-se em cinzas, como suas histórias.” (179) They have all come, and in their turn have all been overturned. Ana needs to develop her own theory, to search for meaning in unexplored words. Her composition of “Instantaneísmo” and the attempt to live carelessly lost in space, not bound by a time other than the materialized instant, ultimately fails her as well. “O que destruo persiste na negação do que existia” (177). Destruction also encompasses an instant, and the memory of what is lost. Its meaning is found in this precise memory, for it justifies the necessity of that instant of annihilation. After this revision of her philosophy, Ana discovers that meaning is not found in destruction, but in transformation.
The search for the absolute in the self is a denial of the self’s multiform existence, the composition of all its defining instants. Ana, filled with her factual and her imagined realities, cannot fulfill her need of space outside of the city. Only Brasília can embrace her, for only Brasília is not a city full of itself. “Esta é a cidade do zero, a cidade do vazio”. (196) With no theories or expectations, Brasília embraces freely those who want to attach meaning to its contrasts and symbols. “Brasília deixou de ser minha prisão voluntária. É a cidade de Diana, caçadora de ilusões”(203). This city is what one makes of it, the beginning of some unspecified mystery, which is only glimpsed through the construction of love." - Priscila Martins

João Almino, A Samba Tale

"When most Americans think of Brazil, their thoughts usually turn to soccer, Carnival, and - of course - samba. But there are many samba, not just one. There is the samba do morro or hillside shanty samba, the samba de clube or the samba danced in exclusive clubs. And there is the samba-enredo or "samba story" that plays a special place in carnival parades.
João Almino′s new novel, Samba-Enredo or Samba Story plays with this last type of samba. Ostensibly written by a computer named G.G. or Gigi, the book focuses on the intrigue surrounding the kidnapping of Brazil′s first black president and the events leading up to his eventual death. Although the title refers on one level to the ongoing carnival procession whose varied segments the computer registers, samba is also a sort of shorthand for the Brazilian nation, which is in many ways the book′s true protagonist. Deliciously ironic, the book has led some of Brazil′s foremost critics to compare João Almino to the country′s celebrated turn-of-the-century novelist Machado de Assis (himself often compared to the Laurence Sterne of Tristram Shandy). If the very short chapters --ostensibly computer entries with often amusing titles-- recall Machado, so does the author′s mordant humor and capacity for understatement.
Samba Story is the second novel by a remarkable author. (His earlier Ideias para onde passar o fim do mundo or "Ideas about where one might spend the end of the world" tells the story of a deceased screenwriter who returns to earth in order to finish a film script.) Not just a writer of fiction, João Almino holds a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and has authored various studies on social and political questions. Presently the Brazilian consul in San Francisco, he has taught literature courses at U.C. Berkeley and Stanford.
U.S. readers will be intrigued by the Brazil they encounter in the pages of this well-translated novel. While the city of Brasilia appears stripped of the proud modernity it inevitably displays in tourist magazines, the dancers in the streets remain defiantly, if often uncomprehendingly, joyous. Although the novel initially appears to be a detective story, it is also a meditation by an often unexpectedly lyric computer. The ordenador (literally "order-maker" in Portuguese and, as such, an indirect pun on the "liberty and order" emblazoned on Brazil′s flag) G.G. causes the reader to reflect not only on what it means to be a present-day Brazilian but also on what it means to live in a world where very little is certain and machines and humans join to construct--and to unravel—plots." - Candace Slater

"After reading the original draft of A Samba Tale, the second novel of diplomat João Almino, Jorge Schwartz, professor of Latin American literature at the University of São Paulo, concluded that the author had succeeded at a task many considered impossible: to show the ever more incongruent Brazil of the 90′s, transforming the country into one great allegory.
Applauded by the critics in 1987, when his Ideas for Where to Spend the End of the World was published by Brasiliense, Almino retraces the path of that fantastical narrative to sketch the portrait of a tragic Brazil through the adventures of Gigi, a computer in love with its mistress, in this case a writer. It is the computer that thinks: "For her I channel my sounds into a thick, dull voice, trying to disguise as best I can my mechanical coldness."
A career diplomat now living in San Francisco, Almino, 43, is visiting Brazil for the release of A Samba Tale (tomorrow at 7:00pm, at Bookmakers bookstore in Gavea). He says that the book will cause "a kind of estrangement" in the reader, since the narrator is a machine.
In this new novel, whose plot takes its departure from a Carnival parade, Almino invests anew in the path that he has made his own, and that has proved so contagious among his numerous fans, including the writer Ana Maria Machado and the diplomat and poet Francisco Alvim. While Machado praises Almino′s capacity to combine ingredients of science fiction and politics in a very humorous story, Alvim identified as early as Almino′s first novel a certain philosophical tension, a type of disquiet particular to existential heroes, like those of Albert Camus.
While the computer Gigi has a limited perspective, Almino endows his machine with a broad gaze, which permits it to enter the "electronic pores" of the most diverse situations and to see events and people from unusual points of view. Throughout the narrative, there appear characters from an imaginary national political life, such as the president Paulo Antonio Fernandes, his wife Madalena, the professor Ana Kaufman and the President′s daughter, a carnavalesque rock-and-roller. "Since the narrative is a very agile one, centered on this Carnival parade which moves very quickly through the streets, there are several secondary characters who serve to give a general vision, in broad brushstrokes, of this Brazilian moment, which is given no date," says Almino.
Haquira Osakabe, professor of literary theory at Unicamp, says that with this book Almino ranks alongside the two best novelists of his generation, the Amazonian Milton Hatoum and the Sergipean Francisco Dantas. And he explains that, with A Samba Tale, the author retells his first novel, Ideas on Where to Spend the End of the World. For Osakabe, it is as if the facts, index cards and annotations from that first novel were still in the computer′s memory, which the computer was moved to look over again. It is from "this attempt to reorganize the facts, thereby obtaining a new vision, that A Samba Tale is born”.
If, in the first book, the story is told allusively, in the second the drama emerges from unsuspected twists. Everything would lead us to believe that the intrigue is of a political nature, but the computer discovers that it is in fact of a romantic one. That is to say, A Samba Tale has a political side that is possible, but is not. And a love-story side that is impossible, but is.
If he identified in the previous novel a "virtual novelist", Osakabe says that he is now witnessing the birth of a writer of "refined style and fertile imagination, who manipulates language extremely well" to tell the story of this country which symbolizes Brazil as a collection of dreams and nightmares.
The writer Márcio Souza includes Almino in the tradition that runs from Lima Barreto through Machado de Assis, both of whom employed the same corrosive humor as the author of A Samba Tale. For Souza, the historical moment that emerges in the novel is that of a country which defies the most advanced of softwares and computer chips.
"It is a story of lost illusions, of lost moments, of frustration. It is a Brazilian story from an author who is a master of his craft."
Despite his technical and affective familiarity with the computer, João Almino still has recourse, sporadically, to old-fashioned paper and pencil to tell the stories of a country that still preserves the bias of an authoritarian culture, which the author himself identified in "Authoritarian Democrats", published in 1980.
"In Brazil, we have a social structure of favor. Our laws are very precise and, in spite of that, we are always ready to bypass them."
Although he laments Brazil′s lack of a civic tradition, he is convinced that there already exists the embryo of a new political order.
"We live at a moment that demands intense effort in order to consolidate our institutions, a period of perfecting democracy in this country. This is a task that requires a great deal of work." - Elizabeth Orsini

"But I have my mark. And I believe that style makes the machine. My own is that of Brazil at the end of this century -- unrestrained, but hobbled and limping." Thus, the computer-narrator of A Samba Tale, João Almino′s new novel, defines its, shall we say, singular physiognomy, and the no less singular meaning of its destiny.
A storehouse of superimposed and interspersed memories that refer to the disappearance of Brazil′s supposed first black President in the midst of the last Carnival, the computer will activate its mechanism with the help of the ghost of that President′s daughter. With these resources, the computer will try to replay the drama and its setting. In this way, the reader witnesses the emergence of an always surprising, carnivalesque Brazil, a synthesis of all our cultural vectors, along with the recomposition of an assassination plot which could not belong to any other time or place.
In fact, João Almino′s narrative gimmick results from the felicitous solution he uses to pick up the episodic residues of his previous novel, Ideas for Where to Spend the End of the World (Brasiliense). It is as if the files, index cards and scribbles used in the construction of that novel were still demanding anew order and (why not?) a new style.
And João Almino responds well to that demand. A Samba Tale is great: it reveals a fine narrator and a first-rate style. Of course, it is the gimmick of the computer-narrator that, at first, commands attention: by activating the computer′s memory, the author exposes the reader, not so much to the plot, but to data that could very well serve another purpose.
What emerges from the computer′s memory is not the political occurence itself, nor the police thriller that is always in evidence, but rather the always surprising individual physiognomy of the actors, patently fragile to withstand their Apollinian condition as protagonists of a national drama. In this way, alongside a carnivalesque and mythic Brasilia emerges the far more drastic and definitive one of lovers beneath the moon.
Thus, the great merit of this novel seems to rest in its allegorical force. By placing his drama at the end of this century during Carnival in Brasilia, João Almino rallies in his work the imponderable forces that command our destiny: a Brazil/Brasilia spinning on itself; a new world that never arrives; a machine that, in rewriting the story, is unable to hide from human emotion and ends by turning Brazilian, taking on what the computer itself calls the clumsy, lefthanded style of this end-of-the-century country.
Here, attention should be called to the question of language in the novel. Along with the well-woven structure and the well-resolved plot, what stands out is the notable stylistic mastery of the author. Varying his registers, forms, and tones, but always clear and secure in his expression, João Almino produces a text that is destined to last. It would be difficult for a reader not to like this book.
Intelligent, biting and lyrical, A Samba Tale permits us to confer on João Almino the title of Brasilia′s novelist, a voice that that city has deserved for some time." - Haquira Osakabe

"Samba-Enredo, this new novel by Joao Almino -- who also authored the enticing Ideias para Onde Passar o Fim do Mundo (1987) -- achieves that which for many would seem impossible: to present and discuss, through the use of allegory, the increasingly incongruent Brazil of the Nineties. The privileged space of Carnival which weaves through the book is Brasilia and its whirlpool of amorous and palatial trysts. The plot -- narrated or registered step by step by a computer in love with its owner, an author -- has as its center the kidnapping and clandestine amorous relationships of the President of Brazil, Paulo Antonio Fernandes. The humanized narrating machine questions its own existence and that of men. The latter, for their part, appear reified in the artificiality of current ideologies and in the almost pulp fiction-like eroticism of their emotions.
Joao Almino reveals his mastery of narrative art especially in the fragmented character of romanesque construction and in the fine humor and irony which graze over the quick chapters/episodes. His refined poetry-prose opposes the necessary superficiality of the narrated material. There is a deliberate crushing of emotion that melds with the urban landscape which oscillates between the coldness of the Capital and the Carnival scenes in which all of the mésalliances of the Brazilian people occur. Such distancing from that which is narrated reinforces in an extraordinary manner the banalization of power in political and human relations. In this sense, a possibly tragic reading of Brazil ironically takes place in this unidimensional political-social canvas in which none of the ingredients of our poor daily lives masked by the parade of the samba-enredo is missing." - Jorge Schwartz

"One of the principal merits of A Samba Tale, the new novel by João Almino, is that it reopens Brazilian fiction′s dialogue with Machado de Assis, especially the Machado de Assis of Epitaph of a Small Winner. Even the sober but nevertheless present visuality of the novel recalls Machado. A sort of poem - in the style of Machado′s "to the worm/ who first gnawed/ the cold flesh/ of my cadaver" - opens A Samba Tale. "I dedicate/to the wandering souls/and to the fragments/of displaced brains..."
Displacement. This may be one of the touchstones to understand the novel: the first person is dislocated from the narrative, giving way to a computer in love with its mistress. This is Machadian doubt, evoking the opening of Epitaph of a Small Winner: "I hesitated some time, not knowing whether to open these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, i.e., whether to start with my birth or with my death."
In A Samba Tale, this doubt reconfigures itself thus: "I shall tell you, user who believes and consults me, though you know that my craft is to live by artifice, of my attempt to manipulate the past with the help of a ghost."
This capacity for language, in the Almino of A Samba Tale, is used to attempt an encounter -- albeit a melancholic one – with Brazilian reality. We read: "If you will permit me a machine′s reflection, in this interval as I fly between the moon and the story: I just don't know if the two protagonists of these past scenes, that is, Ana and the President, will have been as virtuous as the sewer, which, by cutting short their encounter, surely, as the title indicated, avoided a scandal."
The novel′s story is simple, in the sense that it is everyday, common, almost journalistic. As Professor Jorge Schwartz summarizes on the inside flap of the book, "The Carnival that runs through the novel concerns Brasilia and its whirlwind of amorous and palatial intrigues, as a privileged space. The plot has as its center a kidnapping and the amorous and clandestine relations of the President of Brazil, Paulo Antonio Fernandes."
Almino mobilizes, in the prose of A Samba Tale, the maximum of reflective intelligence to try to comprehend the banal and alienating carnivalization of contemporary Brazilian culture: a computer/narrator; the plot of a thriller; the kitsch aesthetic; the most horrific fusions; the colloquiality of sentences broken, in artistic punctuation, by a sudden density of language. Like Epitaph of a Small Winner, the novel has a structure of short chapters, which give tension and pressure to the development. The novel has all the elements to fall into a pop Oswaldianism: the brutality and the fierce juxtaposition of ideas. João Miramar and Serafim Ponte Grande are both masterpieces of Brazilian literature, but they have been copied to the extreme. That is one of Almino′s merits: to avoid a brutal Tropicalist mode in speaking of Brazil, returning to the reflective, ironic tone of Machado (who, indeed, influenced Oswald himself). There is a certain balance, for example, in: "As Pedro′s wounds are cared for, the audience, outside, is occupied with the prophetess Iris Quelemem, who picks up the message that the President is safe, but far away; no one knows exactly where. She picks it up, she says, by thought transmission."
But fictional prose is not sociology. A Samba Tale is also extremely well written (and constructed), with moments of lyricism, irony, poetry. Almino is capable of creating a collage of the visual aspects of scenes and objects. The text itself brings information. And outlines the characters: "Gazing out over the swarthy crowd as if looking for someone, a woman stands out, tall, quite dark, with slightly oriental eyes, thick lips and a prominent nose, (...), her long hair black as night. She wears a dress below the knee, very floral, wide, full-skirted, the cut of which enhances her still firm breasts, which need no bra. It is Professor Ana Kaufman."
The Brazilian heaviness and lazy sensuality of the description are abruptly interrupted by the foreign name: "Kaufman". These kinds of subtleties run throughout the text of A Samba Tale, as in the pseudo-ingenuous lyricism of: "The night is still bright. The full moon shines on the quick and lonely clouds which, plucked by the wind, flee from those denser clouds that have come to stay. The city unveils itself above the sparkle of Lake Paranoá. In the foreground the Congress is visible, along with the television tower and the skyline of the financial district..."
An adulterous mixture of everything, Brazilian culture is reprocessed with intelligence and sensibility by João Almino, in a synthesis, a happy appropriation of Machado and Oswald (the latter more in terms of content). Or, as Jorge Schwartz observes: "...a possible tragic reading of Brazil appears ironically in the very unidimensionality of the socio-political fabric, in which no ingredient is missing that constitutes the poverty of our daily life, masked by the samba parade."
A computer-narrator, then, for an apparent crime story (the kidnapping of a President and various hypotheses for its solution) which serves in fact as the conducting thread for a poetic reflection, dense in rhythm, on Brazilian reality. The reader will not feel betrayed, as does the computer ("At first I thought, ingenuously, that the lovely Silvia, in proposing marriage, was interested in me. But I was mocked."). He or she will have read one of the most consistent accomplishments in Brazilian fiction." - Regis Bonvicino

Almino, João. O diabrete angélico e o pavão: enredo e amor possíveis em Brás Cubas. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2009.


Review by Marta de Senna



João Almino, Free City

Excerpts from the novel Cidade Livre (Free City), by João Almino, 2010. Translation by Alison Entrekin:


here

and here

Almino's web page