Dalton Trevisan - Though we wince every time he touches an exposed nerve, he holds us with singular fascination. The subject matter may be repellent but his art is hypnotic

Dalton Trevisan, The Vampire of Curitiba and Other Stories, Trans. by Gregory Rabassa, Knopf, 1972.






THIS IS THE FIRST English-language collection of the best stories by the best story writer in contemporary Brazil-selected from his entire published work and superbly translated by Gregory Rabassa. THE narratives and sketches that make up THE VAMPIRE OF CURITIBA AND OTHER STORIES speak for the lost and the lonely, the irresponsible and unfaithful, the people who are the odds-and-ends of life. They are revealed, and reveal themselves, at the point of confrontation: with one another, with death, with memories and illusions. A woman s rantings about her husband, whose sight, sound, smell, and touch she cannot bear, are counterposed to the absent offender s barroom eloquence. Fraught with the exaggerated sensibility of four o clock in the morning, an insomniac s anti-paean to his surroundings is interrupted by an encounter with a cockroach, a fellow sufferer. A young man seeks solace not so much for his father s death as for his absence from it. A young couple struggle unsuccessfully for privacy from a beer-drinking granny who hears all. A father and son confront each other across a chasm of mutual blame and derision. A woman, mortally ill, resists the dying of her lamp s flame. A man separated from his wife and daughter attempts to impose his own reality on an uncooperative world. An anonymous, repeated accusation of unfaithfulness is the bit of dirt which grinds to a halt the shaky machinery of a marriage. Two men quarrel violently over a debt, While the children of the debtor look and listen. The truth about a multiple rape elusively changes form as the story is seen from varying points of view. A young man sits over a cognac watching women pass by and addresses a silent, lusty, bittersweet monologue to each in turn. With a style that is deceptively simple, chillingly casual, Dalton Trevisan, in each of these direct yet subtle tales, impales on a single moment the fears and passions and despairs of men.








Brief, shadowy, slant-viewed vignettes of life in and near the Brazilian town of Curitiba -- which is in fact a provincial capital roughly the size of Baltimore, but which, in the world's awareness and Trevisan's treatments, might as well be some supranational twilight zone, the last stop on all the lines. God knows what it's really like; the atmosphere here is close and hot with decay, objects are lost in indifference, and feverish sexuality preserves the last semblance of vitality and relationship. Nelsinho, the vampire, is typical of Trevisan's characters: a young, self-engrossed erotomaniac, otherwise without distinction, whose emotional radius is the gyre of lust, contempt and self-loathing. He is also loathsome, and that is perhaps more to the point. Trevisan, like Borges and others, enjoys the latent dimension of things, but with Trevisan that dimension is essentially sexual rather than metaphysical, and entirely negative. The affairs (most of the stories are about affairs, in terse reports or remembered monologues) erupt out of no context but compulsion and only begin to develop with the growth of the lovers' mutual disgust and nausea, which is projected through ugly incidentals distorted to monstrous prominence -- varicose veins, hearing someone eat, a whine, subliminal cruelty. All that granted, he is an interesting writer little known here till now, and this will bring English readers abreast of his work. - Kirkus


In few, very few, pages Trevisan captures characters who live continually tearing each other apart in the claustrophobic provincial city of Curitiba in the south of Brazil. They live mediocre lives, burned by a desire that is not only sexual; they are suicidal maniacs who use each other for their own alienated ends. It is easy to recognize in them the characters of naturalistic fiction, Gorky's ex‐men, the secretly vice ridden citizens of Sherwood Ander son's “Winesburg, Ohio,” but stripped bare by Trevisan's relentless obser vation. Precise, a bit obsessive, the author retraces again and again the dirty footsteps of his characters. His stories (like certain tales by Mel ville and Kafka in Borges's interpre tation) present “fantasies of be havior.” Totally unreal in spite of the mimetic surface, relentless like dreams, they do not always escape the monotony of a too self‐centered vision. - E. Rodriguez Monegal
www.nytimes.com/1972/12/24/archives/the-vampire-of-curitiba-and-other-stories-by-dalton-trevisan.html

This is the first appearance in English, at least in book form, of work by a Brazilian writer who promises on the strength of its contents to be a major figure. He is already a writer of power though his range in this volume is not wide. He is a man who keeps probing the same open wound, exposing what has gone rotten, gangrenous, foul. But though we wince every time he touches an exposed nerve, he holds us with singular fascination. The subject matter may be repellent but his art is hypnotic. In tone and mood, he is bleak and severe, reminiscent a little of Sherwood Anderson's “Winesburg, Ohio,” and of Giovanni Verga in his realistic earthiness. Gregory Rabassa, whose translations are flawless, a fact apparent even to one not at home in Portuguese, suggests as an influence the work of Machado de Assis, in whose writings there was a revival of interest a while back. But I suspect that Trevisan is essentially himself. His style is compact and taut to an extreme. There are 44 stories in this medium‐sized book alone. Effects and changes of locale or time are subtle and done with a minimum of technical maneuvering. The reader must match the author's concentration.

Trevisan can be as noncommittal in tone and as emotionally objective as a police blotter. “The Spy” is simply a report on the brief history of a child brought by her father to a kind of orphanage that also takes in old mad folk. The youngsters not only have to make sense of their own lives but also of those of their crazed companions. Because of cold, insufficient food, lack of care and plain misery the child dies. The father, told about the death on his next visit, remains to wonder what it must have been like for the child to die alone and away from home. But by using these extremes of abandoned childhood and mad old age, Trevisan has fashioned a story granitic in texture and heartbreaking in effect.

A Widening Melodrama

He has marked out for his territory his home town of Curitiba, which Mr. Rabassa tells us is a good‐sized city and the center of a large coffee‐producing area. But to Trevisan it is a place of moral decay and human dissolution. Social responsibilities are reduced to animal‐like levels. Men beat and abandon their wives and children or are indifferently unfaithful. Women cuckold their husbands, and every meeting of a boy and girl becomes a sexual encounter in which, incidentally, someone always gets hurt. - Thomas Lask, NYT

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/01/archives/the-soil-and-some-of-its-fruits.html

DALTON TREVISAN was born in Curitiba, Brazil, in 1925. He studied law but soon abandoned the profession in favor of his family s ceramic business. In 1945 an accident in the factory brought him close to death and led him to begin his writing career. He published a literary magazine called Joaquim from 1946 to 1948, worked as a police reporter and film critic for Curitiba newspapers, and published his own stories in cheap newsprint editions. In 1959 José Olympic published his first collection, Novelas Nada Exemplares, which was quickly followed by Morta na Praca (1964), Cemitério de Elefantes (1964), 0 Vampire de Curitiba (1965), Desastres do Amer (1968), and A Cuerra Conjugal (1969).