https://thecollidescope.wordpress.com/2019/07/07/an-invincible-memory/
This epic historical novel is an anti-history of the author's homeland, Brazil. The narrative follows two families - one of aristocrats, the other slaves - through many generations and vicissitudes.
A family saga spanning nearly 400 years, this absorbing epic novel lays bare the soul of the Brazilian nation. Whaling, war, macumba, slavery, murder, cannibalism and Brazil's struggle for independence add momentum to Ribeiro's lyrical, effusive, sonorous, serpentine prose laced with a touch of magic realism something of a cross between Melville and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (The author himself has rendered the fluent translation.) At the center is Amleto Ferreira, a 19th century paterfamilias and conniving bookkeeper who defrauds a baron of his wealth; Amleto's ladylike, long-suffering wife Teolina; and their children, among them a priest, a romantic poet and a soldier. A bestseller in Brazil, the novel graphically portrays the terrible cruelty inflicted by whites on blacks, mulattos and Indians; the lives of these native peoples unfold in dozens of intertwined stories. The relationship between Merinha, patient, Penelope-like servant girl, and runaway slave Budiao is moving. Also memorable are 100-year-old Great Mother Dadinha and Maria da Fe, a bandit warrior who converses with birds and seeks special power from a sorcerer's charms. Catapulting his tale into the 1970s, journalist Ribeiro ( Sergeant Getulio ) creates a stunning portrait of a people who, though outwardly mirthful, are still not free.
An impressive fictional re-creation of Brazilian history, this work moves from the colonial to the modern era in an attempt to decipher the psyche of contemporary Brazilians. The result is an exhaustive work that leads the reader through time in this fascinating Latin American country. The swarm of characters function to uncover the development of a Creole society based on the mixing of ethnic groups--Indian, European, and black--whose clash at different times produced a national awareness of belonging to native clans. In criollismo literary style, the novel offers varied aspects of native color, such as the Indian ceremony of making mate and the black macumba and spiritualist practices. Essential for the reader interested in a yet unexplored world. - Rafael Ocasio
Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro's novel ''An Invincible Memory'' is about the forging of the Brazilian national identity - the incongruous merging of the various elements of its indigenous, Dutch, Portuguese colonialist and African slave populations into one unified spirit that calls itself Brazilian. As such, the novel attempts to trace the history of Brazil from the arrival of the early Dutch settlers in the 17th century (with some fairly hilarious Rabelaisian passages regarding their cannibalism) to the country's recent struggles with right-wing dictatorship and state-sponsored terrorism. It is an often miserable history, as Brazil endeavors to become itself during its colonial periods, its fight for independence in 1822, the freeing of its slaves and its critical war with Paraguay, which began in 1864. In this panoramic, epic sweep, ''An Invincible Memory'' - fluently translated from the Portuguese by the author himself - tries to give its readers not merely a story, but the history of a people.
The second novel of a former journalist and teacher, the book is written in a nonlinear, episodic style. Mr. Ubaldo Ribeiro plays a kind of historic hopscotch; there is a general forward movement that ultimately carries us toward present-day reality. (For example, consecutive episodes are dated June 10, 1821; June 9, 1827; Feb. 26, 1809; June 11, 1827.) The complex plot is generational and virtually universal in its scope, with characters who represent the members of the Brazilian class system, such as the patron-colonial ruler, the slave, the mulatto. Its patchwork skips from date to date, character to character. If this sounds confusing, it is, unless one is well versed in Brazilian history. (Given the complex format and cast of characters, a simple genealogical or chronological chart would certainly have helped the North American reader, as it does in such works as, say, the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation of ''War and Peace'' or the Gregory Rabassa translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ''One Hundred Years of Solitude.'') The novel's many subplots spin off like the spokes of a wheel. To take one example, a baron of the empire lives in the coastal town of Bahia, where he is in charge of the fishing industry. He has tremendous wealth, many slaves and so forth. The way he became a baron and a hero in the battle for independence is an important element of the book. He secretly killed one of his slaves, smeared himself with the slave's blood and declared himself to have been wounded in combat. Another slave happened to witness this killing, and the baron ordered his tongue cut out at the root so that he could never reveal what he saw.
The baron prospers and grows powerful, and one day he rapes a young slave who is actually an African princess named Veve. He believes the slave girl has been killed or sent away after the rape, but she remains and delivers his child nine months later, a beautiful, green-eyed girl who will become known as Maria da Fe. Concurrent with the birth of this child, some of the baron's slaves begin a revolutionary faction called the Brotherhood of the Flour House. After Maria, as a young girl, witnesses the brutal murder of her mother (who was trying to protect her daughter from rape by eight white men), she joins the brotherhood and becomes a major revolutionary force herself.
While the novel does have these poignant moments, their impact doesn't carry through the whole. In part, the structure - its splices in time, its mosaic of small incidents and subplots - never lets the reader sink very deeply into any one story. But the real problem is the characters themselves. Rather than being fleshed-out, organic outgrowths of the story, they are stereotypes, inventions in the service of an idea: the horrid baron, the rebelling slaves, the conflicted mulatto, the monsignor who makes endless speeches espousing the church's viewpoint, never really come to life on the page.
For instance, when Patricio Macario - a rather mediocre military man whose destiny it is to fall permanently and impossibly in love with the great revolutionary Maria da Fe - finds himself face to face with the son he never knew existed, the offspring of his star-crossed love, he says, ''What do you do, my son?'' And the son responds: ''I'm a revolution maker, my father. Ever since my mother's time, even before that, we've been looking for a conscience of what we are. And before that we didn't even know we were looking for something, we just rebelled. But as time passed we accumulated wisdom through practice and thought, and today we know we are searching for this conscience and are finding this conscience.''
While admirable for its ambitious scope and its vision of history, the microcosmic world of the novel topples under the weight of its heavy language and stereotypical characters. There is no Buendia family, as there is in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' whose quirks and foibles carry us along. No Alba, as in Isabel Allende's ''House of the Spirits,'' who narrates her story in such a way that our hearts break in the final pages. Instead, we have a novel of ideas told by a student of history, rather than a story told by a real storyteller.
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