Rodrigo de Souza Leão - an extraordinary autobiographical fiction that speaks of mental illness and its controversial treatment, revealing the illumination of the ill in a troubled society

Rodrigo de Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue, Trans. by Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler. And Other Stories, 2013.

excerpt



All Dogs are Blue is a fiery and scurrilously funny tale of life in a Rio de Janeiro insane asylum. Our narrator is upset by his ever-widening girth and kept awake by the Rio funk blaring from a nearby favela – fair enough, but what about the undercover agents infiltrating the asylum? He misses the toy dog of his childhood, keeps high literary company with two hallucinations, Rimbaud (a mischief-maker) and Baudelaire (a bit too serious for him), and finds himself the leader of a popular cult. All Dogs are Blue burst onto the Brazilian literary scene in 2008. Its raw style and comic inventiveness took readers by storm. But it was to be Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s last masterpiece. He died that year, aged 43, in a psychiatric clinic. ‘We’re the minority,’ says our narrator, ‘but at least I say what I want.’ All Dogs are Blue is an extraordinary autobiographical fiction that speaks of mental illness and its controversial treatment, revealing the illumination of the ill in a troubled society.

Full of heart and soul, All Dogs Are Blue is one of the most powerful reading experiences I’ve had. A masterpiece.’ - Cristhiano Aguiar



Rodrigo de Souza Leão is an exceptional author and has had a major impact on contemporary Brazilian literature."—Paulo Scott

When I finished reading the book I was so completely taken by it that I could only think about translating it into Spanish and finding a publisher for it. That’s what I did.’ - Juan Pablo Villalobos

 Life is lived intensely and with gusto at the asylum in Rio. All Dogs are Blue kept me curious and it kept me laughing … Souza Leão is a mind-blowing poet; his attitude seems to be something like: Why not flaunt the language(s) that madness has taught me?’ - Deborah Levy



This book is about being messed up, and "then being messed up even more by numbing doses of pharmaceuticals", Deborah Levy tells us in her introduction to this short, stunning read.

Set in a mental institution in Rio, and told through the medicated lens of its witty, schizophrenic narrator (who is "abducted by aliens" and turned into a plant, among other delusions) Leão's autobiographical novel, translated from Portuguese by Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler, weaves the lives of the poor with the insane, and poetry with psychosis. - Arifa Akbar



Rodrigo de Souza Leão died shortly after the publication of All Dogs Are Blue, an autobiographical novel detailing his time in a Rio de Janeiro mental asylum. Souza Leão uses a kind of language his schizophrenia has taught him, creating a poetry that’s at one moment absurd—his two recurring hallucinations are Rimbaud and Baudelaire—and the next heartbreakingly self-aware. (“Is it the kiss of Judas? Will I betray my father in my madness?”) It’s an innovative, original book, though not an easy one to read. But then, as Souza Leão writes, “The truth can be a sloppy invention and still convince everyone.” —Justin Alvarez



Reading Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s All Dogs Are Blue is like taking an acid-fueled journey into a mystified reality. The novel is about everything and nothing at all. The reader is faced with a guessing game. It can all be true or it can all be the rambling of a drug-addled madman. All Dogs Are Blue is Souza Leão’s last piece of work and a truly awe-inspiring, humorous, and grotesque semi-autobiographical novel. And, however hazy, the brilliance of the novel is crystal.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1965, Souza Leão suffered from schizophrenia and extreme paranoia that kept him chained to his house and psychiatric clinics for most of his life. Jorge Viveiros de Castro, the book’s first publisher, only met Souza Leão once in all the time they worked in the manuscript. It was surprising, to him, how lucidly Souza Leão spoke about being in the grip of mental illness. He was trapped inside his mind and inside his house, using only social media and email to communicate with the outside world. His reclusiveness awarded him a cult fan-base. Souza Leão told Castro that he had a feeling he’d only be famous after his death. In All Dogs Are Blue, Souza Leão writes: “Lots of things can be asylums.” The writer died in an asylum, at 43, just after the book was published. The rest of his works of fiction were published posthumously. None, however, as famous as All Dogs Are Blue, Souza Leão’s only work translated into English.
The unnamed narrator is an inmate of a Rio psychiatric asylum. The book’s semi-autobiographical nature is revealed. Then the game of deciphering fictionalized reality from drug-induced fantasies and the makeshift reality in the narrator’s head begins: When he was six, aliens came and told him they’d be back for him, but thirty years later they have yet to arrive. While he waits, he fills his time obsessing over his mom’s tuna sandwiches, his sexual desire for female family members—except his sister because she is “stupid,” his blue dog, which is “the colour of Haldol,” and losing his virginity to a prickly boar. Meantime, he believes that the CIA and the KGB are tracking him with a computer chip he swallowed.
Early in the novel, the reader becomes aware of the narrator’s duplicitous nature that manifests itself in shape shifting. For example, he goes through several physical transformations—turning into animals or celebrities at will. At times, the narrator becomes a dolphin, other times a whale. In one chapter, he fluctuates between becoming the surly Charles Laughton and the handsome Humphrey Bogart. “Attack on the left flank,” he says “It was my chance to turn into Humphrey Bogart.” In the cracks between worlds he can become whoever he wants.
Sometimes, even within the realm of what seems to be his fantasies, the narrator talks about life in the most relatable way. While he sits in the asylum he contemplates if he’s been left there to die of shame for not believing in God. Often he thinks of where to find God; in the beautiful or the terrible. And he says, “There were butterflies all around. The asylum was a place full of beautiful flowers.”
Beyond those flowers, surrounding the asylum, are favelas—slums—that are bourgeoning. Inside the asylum walls, ensconced in all that beauty, people’s minds decay. Some spend sunny days banging their heads against walls. Some are violent, even murderous. Others live each minute waiting for the their personal ends of the world. For some it’s death, for others it’s the end of the world, or it’s living the rest of their days inside the white asylum walls. And still others, like the narrator, who slip in and out of worlds to survey the wreckage around them and then crawl back inside their headspace.
 - Daniella Bondar

At no point in this firecracker of a book do we really know what’s going on – not with any certainty, anyway. We’re in a Brazilian insane asylum, shackled to one of the inmates, who raves – paranoid, delusional, fragmented – at us for 90-odd pages with barely a pause to draw breath.

He is obsessive, repetitive, insistent, returning compulsively to the same details: the cricket he swallowed as a kid, his toy dog (the same blue as the Haldol pills his doctors prescribe him), the day he saved a house from termites, the implanted chip that allows him to be controlled by the CIA and the KGB. He is constantly horny, somewhat scatologically inclined, and highly literate. He’s also energetic and bracingly funny, and as a fictional character, bounded within the pages of a book, he’s fine company indeed. In the real world he would be heart-breaking.
Having smashed up his mother’s house, the narrator now finds himself consigned to this little cubicle, getting bayoneted by the nurses with injections, taking (or not taking) the blue pills, and submitting occasionally to electroshock therapy. He passes his time observing the antics of his fellow inmates; receiving visits from his family; thinking about one particular nurse (and/ or various other people) to fuel his masturbatory fantasies; and making conversation with Rimbaud and Baudelaire, two inhabitants of his imaginary world. (Rimbaud’s the easier friend, even if you do have to fight off his advances occasionally; Baudelaire can be a bit of a grouch.) Sometimes he knows for sure that they’re figments of his delusion; but they’re also absolutely real to him (he misses them when back on his meds), and as a result they populate the story as real characters for us.
A book like this is all voice – it fails or succeeds by the strength, consistency and sheer irresistibility of the narrator’s voice, his ability to grab readers by the sleeve, saying, Listen to me, I have something to tell you … and somehow making you do as he says. Part of the praise here, then, is due to the book’s translators, the creators of this perfectly modulated bit of high-propulsion English prose. It could so easily have flattened out in the translation, or else stretched into something too shrill, too flashy. But it’s just right – poetic in the detailed carefulness of its craft, but also direct, uncomplicated, unfussy.
All Dogs Are Blue is neither easy nor reassuring. The narrator’s sense of chronology shifts and collapses, and, however lucid he is, the edges between his reality and fantasy are often disorientatingly blurry. But he carries you confidently along, discouraging you from stopping to notice just how bleak it all is – himself, the asylum and his world beyond. It’s the brilliant chaos of a frenzied, unfettered mind, locked away, he says, with the rest of the hospital’s “human debris”. It only adds to the pathos to know that the author died in a psychiatric clinic soon after this book was published.  - Daniel Hahn

Rodrigo de Souza Leão deliberately blurs the line between reality and fantasy in his heartbreaking portrayal of life in a Rio mental asylum. A poet and novelist, Souza Leão was himself confined to home and mental institutions for most of his life and died in a psychiatric clinic, aged just 44, shortly after publishing All Dogs are Blue. It is easy to forget that people who suffer from delusions actually believe that their imagined experiences are real, the paranoid are convinced that they are persecuted, and undergo genuine trauma and confusion. It is this aspect of mental illness that Souza Leão conveys so brilliantly in his mesmerising novella.
The adult narrator has been sectioned by his parents after he smashes up the furniture. He believes that he has swallowed a chip and owns a blue dog-- the colour of his medicine, Haldol. His only friends, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, are imaginary. When serial killer Fearsome Madman joins the asylum, the narrator is pleased to discover that he scares the murderer because he reminds him of the father who beat him as a boy. He is attuned to the tragi-comic elements of his incarceration. Commenting on one of his fellow inmates who repeatedly bangs his head against the wall, he muses: "Imagine if that freak were a footballer, His headers would be unstoppable... Maybe he'd get called up to play for Brazil."
Infantilised in the asylum and by his parents, the protagonist's mind throws up vivid thoughts and constructs complex scenarios at an alarming rate - much like a child's overactive imagination. Moments of lucidity are abruptly interrupted by "the gang" who "bayonet" him with chemicals. He observes himself as he grows fat and starts to drool or masturbates silently. Throughout he waits for his salvation; to be deemed well and released from the asylum. Towards the end of the novel he founds a cult known as Todog (read in reverse and you have one of many Beckettian allusions in the work).
For the narrator, heavily sedated "to keep a state of order", the overcrowded asylum comes to represent Brazil: "There were all those poor people, really poor people: this was Brazil. A total mess. People lying on the floor. People dead on arrival. People dying." Later, he laughs at the Christian who visits the patients: "Fundamentalists are taking over the world. They're even coming here to recruit the utterly fucked."
Souza Leão autobiographical account of schizophrenia is written with tremendous verve and perspicuity, crisply translated by Zoe Perry and Stefan Tobler. All Dogs are Blue is a profound examination of the tricks and quirks of a fragile mind and Souza Leão demonstrates with startling humour how easy it is to tip from sanity into delusion. - Lucy Popescu



The kind of madness that interests people, Rodrigo de Souza Leão says in a 2008 interview, is stereotypical madness: madness that bears no relation to reality, with its romanticised sufferers dressed in folkloric clothes and behaving in such a way that they are recognised as ill wherever they go. The kind of madness at the centre of All Dogs Are Blue, Souza Leão’s astonishing portrait of the internal and external reality of a schizophrenic in a Rio mental hospital, is far from stereotypical.  This protagonist is articulate, reflexive and self-aware, seductive but never romanticised, and it is his voice that makes this such an extraordinary novel.
“I’m loco-lite, the diet version,” he tells us.  His psychological condition fluctuates between hallucinations, delusions and moments of lucidity, and his concerns fluctuate too, between the fantastical and the mundane. He worries that there is a door in the asylum that makes people disappear, and that his imaginary friend Rimbaud might have romantic designs on him, but also that his medication is making him too fat to be attractive to the nurses, that it’s been a while since they were served guava jelly with dinner and that Brazilian politicians are earning far too much money.  As we read this short novel, we inhabit his shifting and unreliable world that is sometimes a “life full of fears”, sometimes full of possibilities, but always built from what-ifs. What if the blue soft toy dog he had as a boy were real? Would it eat blue food? Would it take blue medicine, like him?
“My process was that of attempting to make the prose close to schizophrenia,” Rodrigo de Souza Leão explains in the same interview. “In order to achieve this, I resolved to move the prose towards poetry. The natural language of a lunatic is, let’s say, a little poetic.” And thus, by imitating poetry, the novel’s prose imitates madness: this is not poetry about madness, but rather poetry being used to reflect a psychological condition that happens to share its structure.  And so the protagonist’s words take on a vivid truthfulness: the repeated phrases are obsessions rather than refrains; the metaphors more like overlapping realities than juxtaposed ideas.
The result is an untrustworthy landscape with movement and stasis in all the wrong places, making it difficult to know where to lean. There is a sense of being constantly caught unaware by your surroundings, be it through sudden realisations that “there were hippos everywhere”, or subtler moments, such as when pot plants suddenly “sprout up like beanstalks” in the corners of rooms and bread is buttered in violent “swipes”. Similarly, as Rodrigo is smashing up the furniture in his house before being admitted to the asylum, we encounter one of the novel’s most wonderful lines: “things [...] self-destructed when I stroked them”.
All Dogs Are Blue is brilliantly funny throughout – for instance, when the narrator describes how prostitutes these days “do anything.  They might even pay you to have sex with them”. But it is also terribly – at times almost unreadably – sad. It manages this without ever being sentimental, disguising its painful truths within the rhythms of comedy. This is tragedy with comic timing, these are punchlines that hurt: “Where’s Baudelaire?  He’s playing snooker. / It’s so sad when your friends are two hallucinations.” Some of the most difficult parts to read involve the narrator’s parents. Although his narrator may appear to overlook their feelings, Souza Leão never allows the reader to forget how acutely this is their tragedy too:
“My brother is bipolar. He suffers from being sad. He suffers a lot. My dad studied psychiatry because of him, and then because of me. My dad was a paediatrician. Now he’s a psychiatrist. I would like to have studied at Cambridge. So I could help my sons more.”
Souza Leão has referred to another of his literary projects as a mix, comparing himself to a DJ (incidentally, until his diagnosis with schizophrenia in his early twenties, he had planned to become a radio presenter), and the analogy is appropriate here as well. All Dogs Are Blue is a collage of collages, it is many madnesses at once: the noise of the city merges with the noise of the protagonist’s mind, as the infamous Rio funk music seeps in through the asylum windows from the favela outside and keeps him awake at night. The novel is filled with references to Brazilian culture, from its literature and music to the ubiquity of the much-derided – but also much-watched – soap operas: “You know Ana? She’s going to kill Marcos. Olivier is coming back for Marcos. Pereira is breaking up with Maju. Lina is going to end things with Maciel.”
Translators Stefan Tobler and Zoë Perry masterfully work this web of Brazilian cultural references into their version of the novel, intriguing but never patronising or mystifying the reader. Their translation impresses for the same reason as the novel itself: like the author, they are impeccable ventriloquists who have reproduced a voice that could never belong to anyone else, that is unmistakeable and utterly original, and they have also reproduced, equally flawlessly, the many other voices contained within it. “A banana bar. Who wants a banana bar? A banana bar. Who wants a banana bar? Who wants to buy a banana bar? The sun was a ball of mango ice cream.”
The novel is also a collage of views on mental hospitals and treatment methods. Sometimes hospitals are “really nice places, full of lots of flowers and trees”; sometimes they are proof that God does not exist. “There’s the movement against mental hospitals. But where do you put all the people with no family, who are lost causes?” Sometimes treatment is there to punish, and sometimes to cure, but one thing that remains constant through these shifting perspectives is the fear that some people never get better.  This is why this ingenious, charismatic, musical mix of a book is so devastating to read: the narrator’s “moments of lucidity” are only ever moments, samples of a track he will never get to hear in full, mixed out as dexterously as they are mixed in.
“You wait,” the narrator threatens at one point in the novel, as nurses continue to “bayonet” chemicals into his flesh: “I’ll survive long enough to expose this whole dirty game.” For a second after reading this, you might wonder if that is what this book is supposed to be doing: revealing the inadequacies of the Brazilian mental health services. Just as quickly, however, you realise it is nothing of the sort. All Dogs Are Blue goes deeper than a simple exposé: there are too many sides to it, too many truths all at once. If it has a message, it is that this is what this is like – and it is a message that is delivered with astounding success. Souza Leão’s acheivements are rare and magnificent: a voice that makes no concessions to the reader and yet never ceases to entertain them, and a work that is intensely experimental but makes you believe every word. All Dogs Are Blue is sometimes ugly, often beautiful and always alive – and it is unforgettable. - Annie McDermott



All Dogs Are Blue is a startling, often erratic, stream-of-confused-consciousness novel by Brazilian novelist Rodrigo De Souza Leão.
Set in a Rio insane asylum, All Dogs Are Blue follows Souza Leão’s struggle with a mental illness akin to schizophrenia, and his journey from solitary confinement, through the wards, to eventual release. The autobiographical nature of this slim novel is never spelled out explicitly, except for in the introduction by Deborah Levy, yet the raw and stripped back style rings with the authority of someone who has lived through everything. This is a stunning story full of heartbreaking sadness and dark comedy in equal measures; the three-way friendship with imaginary Rimbaud and Baudelaire, provides much of the novel's humour.
The interaction between the narrator and other people is wonderful. During his time in the asylum, family members, who had him committed after a particularly destructive outburst, regularly visit him. These scenes are touchingly beautiful and reveal a little more each time about the narrator’s life before the asylum.
The style of the novel is direct yet poetic; Souza Leão seamlessly jumps from one thought to another and often repeats himself, highlighting how such mental illnesses can affect people’s minds. We never get the impression that we are being made to feel bad for the narrator, though – this is not a story to draw out sympathy – it is too truthful and honest for that. It is simply a pure statement of a life. - Alex Thornber



Consider: the novel as rant, lament, or aria. Think Bolano’s short novels and Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser; think of Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life and Norman Lock’s The King of Sweden and Robert Lopez’s Kamby Bolongo Mean River. All feature protagonists whose minds are somehow askew, whether through a long and embittered life, mental illness,  severe isolation, or some other condition that sets them apart from the rest of the world. All Dogs Are Blue, the final novel from the Brazilian author Rodrigo de Souza Leão, fits in neatly with that admirable tradition, and throws in an added dose of hardfought sentimentality to the proceedings. How you like that may well depend on how you reacted to that last sentence; for me, the novel’s pained, honest prose left me reeling for much of its length.
As Souza Leão’s Brazilian publisher notes in an afterword, this short novel’s success in Brazil did not come until after its author’s death. It’s an unlikely choice for cult-book status; it follows the observations of an institutionalized man in Rio as he follows daily routines, converses with possibly imaginary friends, and interacts with other patients and his family. Souza Leão’s prose works in rhythms; his narrator often circles a given topic, sometimes glibly eliding it and at others contradicting himself, offering multiple takes on one point of order. Consider:
The first taste of freedom is leaving the cubicle. The second is walking around the asylum. Freedom itself only happens outside the asylum. But real freedom doesn’t exist. Heading for freedom, I always run smack into someone. If there were freedom, the world would be one big madhouse with everyone in it.
He’s also acutely aware of bodies. “I swallowed a chip yesterday,” the novel begins — and, yes, some of the observations made about the narrator’s body appear to be entirely delusional. Other moments of physicality seem more grounded, from his musings on his own weight (which seems excessive) to matter-of-fact allusions to masturbation. As he speaks in circles, a sort of portrait emerging out of areas exposed and covered. It also doesn’t hurt that the cyclical, obsessive prose can yield utterly gorgeous passages.
Why drink coffee with sugar when you’re fat? Everything with lots of sugar. I look at clocks and coffee cups. I spit soap bubbles. I turn into a train that goes along without knowing where to stop. I transform myself into a writing machine and it writes whatever I want it to write.
When he gets going, the headlong rush of prose and ideas becomes breathtaking. And — though it may be something of a cliché — it makes a relatively confined narrative much more open. The specifics and obsessions that occur throughout the book, the names of drugs and fellow patients and the memories of childhood and of more recent street scenes all feel seared into place. But it’s a more universal motif that ultimately makes All Dogs Are Blue resonate at a welcoming pitch.
The title references a stuffed animal owned by the narrator. As Deborah Levy points out in her introduction, it may also be a nod to Winston Churchill’s “black dog” — i.e., his personification of depression. As befits a beloved stuffed animal owned since childhood, there is more than a little sentimentality present there — but it also serves as a kind of anchor for the novel as a whole, grounding the narrator in at least one object. That this object is a toy dog with a decidedly unreal color is a fine touch, a moving detail in bright colors. And for all of the things that we don’t know about this brief, crushingly moving book’s narrator, we do know that he was once a child; we can experience something of that innocence, and the heart at his core. It’s an indication of why we should care about this man, and what warm decency lies at the beginnings of this particular narrative. - Tobias Carroll



Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1965, Rodrigo de Souza Leão was diagnosed with schizophrenia in adolescence and spent most his life in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Despite his isolation he gained recognition among Brazil's literary circle, co-editing electronic poetry magazine Zumai and publishing over ten books of poetry and four novels. Originally published in 2008, All Dogs are Blue was Souza Leão's last and most acclaimed novel, published just before his death in a Rio mental asylum aged 43. Thanks to And Other Stories' Stefan Tobler and Zoë Perry, it's been newly translated from Portuguese for English language readers.
Semi-autobiographical, All Dogs Are Blue reveals Souza Leão's own experience of life in a psychiatric institution. Guided by one of the asylums most sharp-eyed and lucid patients we witness the suffering of inmates at the hands of their sadistic psychiatrists, who ‘bayonet', grab and twist their flesh. Rather than inspired by a desire to cure patients, it seems the doctors are concerned with organising the inmates' ‘madness':
"In the old days, anyone who was different or appeared to be a threat was crucified. Nowadays you wind up in places like asylums, which is the best way not to get better."
By turns ferociously violent, achingly funny and intensely sad, All Dogs Are Blue splinters off into paroxysms of fragmented thought as the narrator divulges his deepest, most perverted obsessions - from incestuous fantasies about his aunt and cousin, to visions of popular icons and literary figures, including Natassja Kinski and Baudelaire (the latter appears in boxing gloves and "is nearly always an annoying, cranky prick."). Through Souza Leão's brutal honesty and complete disregard for the taboos of society we are offered an unadulterated insight into not only the fragile psyche of a sufferer of schizophrenia, but our own latent obsessions with sex and violence. As Souza Leão explains: "Violence is so fascinating, and our lives so normal".
Yet alongside these disturbing fantasies, Souza Leão's imaginative power often yields beautiful images. Recounting the narrator's dreams he writes, "In mine there's a hummingbird putting pollen on each star in the night sky". At other points the narrator's imagination becomes polluted by antipsychotic drugs; his room "darkened by doses of Litrasan", and the world perceived in relation to the variegated colours of his medicine: "The Lexaton 6 green sea. The Haldol 5 blue sky. The Rivitrol white clouds."
A candid, frenetically paced portrayal of mental illness that lurches between the darkest realms of consciousness and the most elevated and poetic, it is a novel about the institutionalisation of the imagination, about the individual versus society. As Souza Leão puts it: "We're the minority, but at least I say what I want". - Simon Arthur 


Brazilian writer Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s All Dogs Are Blue is like no other book in the world. That is not to say it is entirely original; its many literary and social references, including the author’s own re-summarization of the commonplaces (if you can describe them as such) of living in a lunatic asylum, harken to other great works in this subgenre. Although the author may not have read Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or seen Anatole Litvak’s 1948 film The Snake Pit, these works, at moments, have a kinship with Souza Leão’s exuberant depiction of his life in hell.
Then again, this young author—who died at the age of 43, just as this book was published—may have known both of those works. For a man who spent so many years locked away in an asylum, his mind and body interminably altered by drugs, Souza Leão calls upon a huge body of international film, poetry, music, television, and popular events. Indeed, two major poets of the 19th century, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, regularly visit him in his cage in the little room to which he has been consigned in the favela-adjacent institution; with him are not only numerous other mad men and women, but criminals, and the elderly who have nowhere else to go. Although beautiful plants and trees surround his building, all day long his fellow prisoners cry out, bang their heads against the wall, and listen to loud television, while at night the endless music and screams of the slums washes over his troubled dreams:
Night came and along with it came the worst thing of all: the soundtrack. Our asylum was next to a favela. Rio funk played all night long and all day too. Go Lacraia, go Lacraia, go Lacraia! Go Serginho, go Serginho. Sleeping with that rubbish playing . . . blaring!
Our hero’s entire world turns different colors depending upon which drug has just been injected into his veins: Benzetacil, Haldol (blue, like the color of his stuffed dog at home), and numerous other concoctions that force the patients to hallucinate and vegetate through what they have left of their lives. Part of the problem, the author lucidly argues, is that clinics mix up their types of patients, trying to medicate them as if they were all suffering from the same problems.
It’s little wonder that in such an interruptive world, Souza Leão has created a work that is not only raw in its vocabulary, filled with descriptions of and events that refer to bodily functions—spit, vomit, urine, shit, etc.—but linguistically lurches from association to association, radically moving from passages of description to narrative events past and present, and from the external to the internal in mid-sentence. “Real” visits from his mother and father are confused with his magical camaraderie with Rimbaud and his more casual friendship with Baudelaire. A discussion of electroshock therapy quickly grows into a serious consideration of why women are not allowed to cohabit with men; this in turn brings up the subject of sex, which the narrator associates with his own loneliness and ultimate sense of nothingness. The lunatics’ performances on a karaoke machine are quickly interrupted by the appearance of agents searching for the killer of the clinic’s former locked-away criminal, Fearsome Madman, who previously killed many people but was afraid of the narrator because he sounded like his father. Some associations function as a sort of psychological undercurrent, while others seem to come out of nowhere. Readers who seek coherence and an authorially controlled narrative will certainly be frustrated in reading All Dogs Are Blue. Stylists will find the work rough going, and logicians will quickly abandon it with despair.
Yet this short fiction, in its subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle repetitions of names, events, slang, and cultural experiences, in the end makes sense in a way that those whom we might describe as sane might never perceive:
Finally they gave me some glasses. But with the glasses I could only look inside people.
And there are moments when Souza Leão and his narrator philosophize in a manner that reaches near profundity:
Violence is so fascinating, and our lives, so normal. I’m talking about a specific kind of violence. Everything can be violent. Even God.
Clearly the narrator of this sometimes maddening work is mad throughout, but he recognizes that in that madness he can at least say what he wants. And in his recognition of his own madness, our hero recognizes his own condition in a way that few us do. He is aware not only that someday he will die, but just how he might die:
I take Haldol to be under no illusions that I’ll die mad one day, somewhere dirty, without any food. It’s the way every madman ends.
Rimbaud falls in love with him, contracts AIDS, and even asks the narrator to marry him, but Souza Leão’s persona doesn’t lose sight of his own reality: the fact that he, himself, is not gay. In the end, both Rimbaud and Baudelaire disappear, only to be replaced by other hallucinations of a vast supportive society of peace-loving Todogs, who, despite the narrator’s imprisonment, grow to include millions of members, altering the reality of the planet. Aren’t all such dreamers described as mad? Even if one’s dream and the whole of one’s past ends up in the rubbish like the narrator’s blue dog, it can always be restored through the imagination, no matter how troubled and sick it has become.
All Dogs Are Blue is no book for literary purists, but is a great read for anyone who can embrace the human spirit. - Douglas Messerli