Beatriz Bracher, I Didn't Talk, Trans. by Adam Morris, New Directions, 2018.
The English-language debut of a master stylist: a compassionate but relentless novel about the long, dark harvest of Brazil’s totalitarian rule
A professor prepares to retire―Gustavo is set to move from Sao Paulo to the countryside, but it isn’t the urban violence he’s fleeing: what he fears most is the violence of his memory. But as he sorts out his papers, the ghosts arrive in full force. He was arrested in 1970 with his brother-in-law Armando: both were vicariously tortured. He was eventually released; Armando was killed. No one is certain that he didn’t turn traitor: I didn’t talk, he tells himself, yet guilt is his lifelong harvest.
I Didn’t Talk pits everyone against the protagonist―especially his own brother. The torture never ends, despite his bones having healed and his teeth having been replaced. And to make matters worse, certain details from his shattered memory don’t quite add up... Beatriz Bracher depicts a life where the temperature is lower, there is no music, and much is out of view.
I Didn't Talk's pariah’s-eye-view of the forgotten “small” victims powerfully bears witness to their “internal exile.” I didn’t talk, Gustavo tells himself; and as Bracher honors his endless pain, what burns this tour de force so indelibly in the reader’s mind is her intensely controlled voice.
Brazil’s Bracher arrives in English with this brilliant, enigmatic rumination of a novel. Gustavo, a recently retired professor, prepares to sell his family home and move away from São Paulo. The process triggers a flood of reminiscences about his parents; his career; his wife, Eliana; and his involvement with the resistance to the military regime that seized Brazil in the 1960s. Gustavo relates how his arrest and torture by the authorities precipitated the killing of Eliana’s brother, Armando, even as he insists, “I didn’t talk.” Nevertheless, Gustavo reflects that the experience turned him into a “sad and troublesome monster.” He shunned responsibility and instead attempted to redeem himself as a father and an educator, even as “Armando was always there, submerged in my thoughts.” Bracher writes that “interrogation, doubt, and listening are ways of doing,” and her novel is more concerned with investigating the sublimation of guilt than it is in answering the question of whether or not Gustavo betrayed Armando. Her refusal to allow Gustavo “to stop and put all these old things in order” transforms what could have been a conventional story about coming to terms with the past into a potent portrait of an agitated mind. Bracher is a force to be reckoned with and has crafted a haunting, powerful novel. -
Publishers Weekly
Pensive novel of political terror and its consequences, set in the shadow of post-junta Brazil.
Born in 1961, just in time to experience the military dictatorship for herself, Bracher turns out a somber slice-of-life narrative centering on a professor who, after a long career in education, is preparing to leave the academy, sell his house, and move to the countryside. Gustavo knows that when he leaves his home, “a developer will tear it down, like all the other old homes nearby.” It doesn’t matter, for he lives in his mind, and there he faces incapacitating guilt over the death of his late wife’s brother, arrested with him as student activists in 1970. “Look, I was tortured,” he protests, “and they say I snitched on a comrade who was later killed by soldiers’ bullets.” Protest as he might that he didn’t do it, that he didn’t talk, Gustavo worries endlessly at his responsibility for Armando’s death—and the death of his grieving wife afterward, “without ever finding out that I’d said what I never said.” Scarred by his experiences in prison, Gustavo has scarcely dared profess a political view since; in fact, he confesses, he is retiring from his job “out of cowardice,” precisely to avoid getting caught up in a revolt against changes in the very pension system that will provide his keep even as he is cheated out of part of it. He protests further: “I was never a revolutionary, never participated in the enthusiasm.” He protests, in the end, too much, and the reader is left to mistrust a narrator who has rationalized for half a century that his comrade and friend, though not deserving death, brought his fate on himself. Bracher’s story turns in on itself, revisiting those long-ago moments from the point of view of an old, tired man consumed by the deeds and misdeeds of youth.
A slender but memorable contribution to the literature of crime and (sometimes self-inflicted) punishment. -
Kirkus Reviews
WALTER BENJAMIN’S short essay “Unpacking My Library” (“Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus”), first published in 1931, begins with an invitation to the reader:
I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness.
The address to the second person is gracious in tone but misleading: the collector’s library — made up, Benjamin is aware, of commodities that have a public, social life, too — is “somewhat impenetrable,” since it’s unique to the personality and past of the one who has juxtaposed these particular tomes.
The narrator of Beatriz Bracher’s recently translated 2004 novel
I Didn’t Talk (
Não Falei), a São Paulo, Brazil, professor named Gustavo who is about to retire and move to the country, is a version of the Benjaminian collector. The physical setting of the novel is almost entirely restricted to the space of the home where Gustavo grew up and which he has just sold. Packing up his house, puttering around his library, Gustavo shares what he encounters: scraps from his sister Jussara’s notebook, pedagogical reports he wrote up decades ago, the manuscript of his brother José’s forthcoming book (an autobiographical novel that returns to the brothers’ childhood and adolescence), which José has left with Gustavo after a recent visit.
Memories begin to leak out of these writings, memories further unleashed by a university student named Cecília’s request to interview Gustavo about his involvement in the resistance to Brazil’s military dictatorship following the 1964 coup d’état and the months he spent in prison in 1970. Gustavo was released only after his friend and brother-in-law Armando died, presumably at the military’s hands.
Published in Brazil on the 40th anniversary of the
Golpe de 64,
I Didn’t Talk can be read as one of many novelistic catalogs of 20th-century atrocities. As with the works of W. G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano, this is a slim, dense novel that lingers in the eddies of personal memory and historical reckoning. In the novel, Gustavo wanders through his childhood home and rifles through his memories while wishing he might “stop and put all these old things in order.”
Benjamin, though, characterized the task of unpacking one’s library as a tension between order and disorder, between the “confusion of a library” and “the order of its catalogue.” Like Sebald’s
Austerlitz (2001) and recent Latin American fiction such as Roberto Bolaño’s
Distant Star (
Estrella distante, 1996) and Alejandro Zambra’s
Ways of Going Home (
Formas de volver a casa, 2011), Bracher’s novel is also a formal experiment that enlists a potentially deceptive narrator and the tricks of montage in order to play with this tension. Understanding the past as an imaginary map filled with mazes and dead ends, the novel considers narration less as an imposition of order than as a kind of language game.
Literature of testimony tends to conclude, with a frisson of pathos, that memory and history are equally deceptive, that historical trauma is ultimately unrepresentable, attempts to narrate it doomed. In
I Didn’t Talk, Bracher is up to something different. Also an editor and founder of the reputable publishing house Editora 34, she is interested in the conditions that make such retellings possible, in the many ways one might catalog the library of a national and personal past.
¤
Within the first pages of
I Didn’t Talk, translated from the Portuguese by Adam Morris, the facts of Gustavo’s case are set forth:
Look, I was tortured, and they say I snitched on a comrade who was later killed by soldiers’ bullets. I didn’t snitch — I almost died in the room where I could have snitched, but I didn’t talk. They said I talked and Armando died, I was released two days after his death and they let me stay on as the school principal.
This passage’s spiraling loops set the stage for the repetitive, recursive structure of the novel. Chronology is shuffled like a deck of cards: Armando was later killed, Gustavo almost died, Armando died; they say he snitched, he could have snitched, they said he talked. (In Portuguese, the repetition is more enchantingly rhythmic, as the word
falar can mean both “to say” and “to talk”: “
mas não falei. Falaram que falei.”) Gustavo will return to each segment of this passage at multiple points: he’ll draw out a memory only to leave it aside and come back to it later, but he never puts it to rest (he never shelves the book).
At just 160 pages, with no chapter breaks, the novel reads as a sharp intake of breath, or a syncopated panting. Scraps of prose, quotations from characters, and jagged excerpts from other literary texts accumulate. They mingle with and contradict each other. We are far, here, from the powerful moral certainty of
the dictator novel, that classic Latin American subgenre. If Gustavo’s narration can be called a confession, its delivery is far more baroque than a typical denunciation or plea of innocence.
A few details are added in the following paragraphs: Armando’s sister Eliana, Gustavo’s wife, died while in exile in Paris soon afterward; Armando’s mother killed herself; Gustavo’s father died soon afterward. Gustavo was left to bring up his daughter Lígia with the help of his own mother. Gustavo still believes that the others assumed he “talked,” though most of them are no longer around to accuse him.
The two identities with which he labels himself continue to be “educator” and “traitor.” But he describes the latter as someone who “hands something over, transmits knowledge”: a professor partial to etymological metaphor — there are digressions on the relationships between “apparent” and “parent,”
traduttore (translator) and
traditore (traitor) — Gustavo tends to veer from claims of innocence to such abstract ruminations. He “didn’t talk,” he reiterates, but now that he might (to Cecília), he frets and stalls and talks in other directions. Unlike Cecília or José — or Bracher, who in her acknowledgments thanks those she was able to interview for the novel — Gustavo is not a natural writer; he tends to get snagged on the building blocks of plot.
Cecília was, like Bracher, a child during the dictatorship years, and in her request to Gustavo she is looking not so much for corroboration as for sensual evocations and linguistic details, for what Gustavo calls, simply, “my age.” Gustavo is, meanwhile, both admiring and resentful of José, who was absent during the repression and resistance of the 1960s. José went off to hike in Machu Picchu, Peru, and smoke in California, only to return years later adorned with a degree and an apparent prerogative to probe his family history.
Reading José’s fiction, Gustavo grows frustrated with the ways he thinks it reduces and irons out their childhood. At one point, picking up on allusions to renowned Brazilian writer Machado de Assis laced throughout the manuscript, Gustavo wryly characterizes them as José’s
Dom Casmurro tendencies, referring to an 1899 Machado novel in which the protagonist becomes destructively paranoid about his wife’s possible adultery. Gustavo may smile, but Bracher seems to be signaling a resemblance between Casmurro’s paranoia and Gustavo’s own assumption that everyone has always considered him responsible for Armando’s death.
Gustavo’s directionless reflections constitute what the Brazilian scholar Roberto Schwarz has called, in describing the experimental formal devices of Machado’s fiction, “an awareness of narrative in the making” — a self-consciousness about the possible mismatch between aesthetic devices and the experiences they seek to portray. Those experiences include not only Gustavo’s memories of authoritarian repression but also an account of the disillusionments of activism, a theme in which
I Didn’t Talk is equally invested. Unlike Armando, “mediator of various factions, a spokesman for all our student demands, a merrymaker, a glutton, a foul mouth, and a miser” — a person who “felt part of any group that life set before him” — Gustavo remembers feeling at odds with the totalizing claims of the young revolutionary left. The novel presents Gustavo’s father, a union man, as a member of the leftist old guard, while Gustavo implies that the teenagers who filled the jail cells with him were more interested in a cultural revolution than in political change.
Gustavo was never an eager activist. He quotes Jonathan Swift approvingly — “I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals” — and describes settling back easily into a quiet administrative career following his release from prison. But unlike Armando, he survived. Uncomfortable with collective action, he has, despite himself, become a symbol of resistance-era activism, laurels he wears with bitter ambivalence.
In refusing to romanticize anti-dictatorship resistance,
I Didn’t Talk implicitly challenges its glorification in accounts of those years that proved easier and more appealing to tell than others. But by only tepidly plumbing the contradictions of leftist activism during Brazil’s dictatorship years, Bracher risks elevating political quietism to the ranks of the aesthetic avant-garde.
This may have something to do with Bracher’s interest in exploring the effects of authoritarianism on cultural production. “Literature, poetry, cinema, art, theater: nothing happened for ten years,” Gustavo remembers. He’s skeptical of Cecília’s ambitions for her own novel, in which she wants “to portray a time when education still seemed to have an explosive meaning, a detonating force.”
I Didn’t Talk never fully resolves whether this utopia was always a mirage or whether it was a real possibility that Brazil’s politics, during its dictatorship but also beyond, cut off at the root.
In a 2013 interview with the Brazilian literary journal
Rascunho, Bracher was faced with the inevitable question of literature’s role in a violent and unequal world. At first, she recoiled: “This belief that art should radically transform the world, that it might create man anew, that it might bring us a kind of enlightenment — I don’t believe that.”
As the interview continued, though, she reflected on how it feels to inhabit another, fictional space for a time, and on the way one might emerge from such a space shaken or touched. “We wouldn’t be able to live without some order to history,” she admitted, yet she challenged the critical commonplace that literature imposes order on a world of disorder and chaos by suggesting that what fiction actually does is “show other ways of organizing our life.”
I Didn’t Talk represents the military men who imprisoned Gustavo as, indeed, the opposite of chaotic: they are systematic, hierarchical, and ordered, unlike the fractured resistance movement attempting to counter them — and unlike the disorderly fiction Bracher offers in turn.
As it nears its end,
I Didn’t Talk becomes even more citational and fragmented, incorporating excerpts from Gustavo’s, José’s, and Jussara’s writing as well as the work of writers such as Edgar Morin, Pedro Nava, and Primo Levi. Polyvocal if not cacophonous, these pages unfurl alternatives to the received order of things — the dictatorship’s account of its history, but also the triumphalist narrative of resistance. Gustavo’s way of reframing his personal history opens these “settled” stories up for revision in a rowdy, Swiftian, fictional public sphere.
The novel concludes, however, in the conditional: “That’s what I’d tell you, Cecília, if it were possible.” By turning Gustavo’s narrative into a hypothesis, Bracher cuts off the experiment before cataloging the results. The stakes lowered, the account withdrawn,
I Didn’t Talk ends abruptly, fading back into what Benjamin called the “darkness” of uncataloged volumes.
—Victoria Baena, Los Angeles Review of Books
Gustavo, the Brazilian professor and narrator of Beatriz Bracher's
I Didn't Talk, has found himself with a lot of time to think about stories. He's recently retired from his job, and as he goes through years of accumulated papers, he finds himself constantly being transported back in time, remembering his past. "Stories are the shape we gave things to pass the time in line at the bank, on the bus, at the bakery counter," he reflects.
There's a single story he keeps returning to, though, and it's one that's haunted him for years. His anguish and self-doubt are at the heart of Bracher's stunning novel, the first of hers to be published in English.
Gustavo wastes no time addressing the story that changed, and almost ruined, his life. In 1970, he was arrested with his best friend and brother-in-law, Armando, by police working for the military dictatorship that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The two had links to left-wing anti-government groups; for this, they were confined to jail and tortured. Shortly after Gustavo's release, his young wife died of pneumonia.
The torture cost Gustavo two teeth and the hearing in his right ear. Armando fared worse; he was eventually shot to death by soldiers. After his release, Gustavo learns that their family and friends suspect him of turning on his brother-in-law: "Look, I was tortured, and they say I snitched on a comrade who was later killed by soldiers' bullets. I didn't snitch — I almost died in the room where I could have snitched, but I didn't talk. They said I talked and Armando died."
The physical torture was temporary, but the emotional torture has never ended for Gustavo. He's haunted by the memories of Armando — "a loudmouth, a truant who always got away with things, a ringleader, a prankster" — and of the wife he lost.
Recent circumstances have prevented Gustavo from forgetting about his past. He's selling his childhood home, which prompts a visit from José, his brother and also a friend of Armando, who wants Gustavo to read his memoir. And a college student writing a novel about the military dictatorship era wants to interview him about his experience in prison. No matter what happens to him, all roads lead back to his dead comrade: "Armando was always there, submerged in my thoughts, and he now returns in force. I think it might have been more tolerable — the weight of accusation, the mark of the damned — if it had been anybody else who got killed."
Gustavo narrates the novel as one long story, drifting from topic to topic, in an almost stream-of-consciousness style, and that's one of the reasons
I Didn't Talk works so well. The structure perfectly mimics the train of thought of a man caught in an endless cycle of guilt and self-doubt, and who still bears the scars of torture, both physical and otherwise. Bracher studs the monologue with sections from letters and books Gustavo has accumulated; it's a clever technique that allows other voices — sometimes conflicting ones — into the narrative.
The pacing of the novel is similarly effective. The reader learns about Armando's death very early on, but Bracher has Gustavo slowly reveal more of the circumstances behind their arrests throughout the book. This raises some inevitable questions: Is Gustavo an unreliable narrator? Could anyone who's gone through what he has be reliable?
Gustavo doesn't go into too much detail about the torture he's suffered, but Bracher renders his anguish in ways that are heartbreaking to read. At one point, addressing his daughter, Gustavo insists, "I didn't kill Armando. Eliana, I didn't talk, can you hear me, my little one, my darling girl, I didn't talk." It's a tremendously affecting passage; it reads almost like Gustavo is trying to convince himself rather than Eliana.
Above all, it's the writing that shines in
I Didn't Talk. Bracher, along with translator Morris, handles immensely difficult subjects beautifully, with language that's sometimes spare, sometimes elaborate, but always gorgeous. It's a novel that's intelligent but not showy, and Bracher's restraint makes the story all the more potent.
And the story is an important one.
I Didn't Talk isn't just about one emotionally bruised man; it's about the lasting effects of violence, and the way cruelty causes its victims to torture themselves. "Maybe no one has ever considered me a traitor except myself," Gustavo thinks at one point. But it's impossible for him to know either way, and that uncertainty is possibly the cruelest cut of all. -
Michael Schaub
choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org/2018/07/31/634109130/violence-leaves-a-lasting-scar-in-i-didnt-talk
“Fragmented memories and recollections of literature are smashed together in this short, experimentally-structured novel about the aftereffects of trauma. Bracher’s story abounds with narrative and thematic contradictions and encompasses everything from the gulf between our own self-image and how others perceive us to the flaws that can arise when one attempts to apply literary analysis to a life. The resulting narrative is unpredictable and its dissonances resonate powerfully.”
-Tobias Carroll —Words Without Borders
I Didn’t Talk, Beatriz Bracher’s first novel to be published in English, revisits the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985, tracing the impact it had on multiple generations. The narrative follows Gustavo, an educator who was picked up and then released by the military in 1970, and who holds himself responsible for his brother-in-law’s death at the hands of the government following his own arrest. Gustavo finds himself at a turning point: selling his family home and moving away from the city to retire. At the same time, a young writer planning a book on the dictatorship years asks to interview him about his experience at the time, which leads him to try to untangle his memories of the era.
Told largely in stream-of-consciousness style, the book weaves Gustavo’s retelling of his own memories with extracts from the personal papers of his friends and associates that he finds as he’s preparing to move out of his family home. The content of these papers often conflicts with Gustavo’s own memory, leading him to question how things really happen. Bracher uses this as a clever commentary on how the same experiences—particularly in the context of family life—are processed differently by individuals. Of particular interest is the unpublished manuscript written by Gustavo’s brother, José, in which he fictionalizes their family life, shifting details just enough so that his version of the story replaces Gustavo’s own memory.
While the central question—did Gustavo give away his brother-in-law?—serves as a locus for the book, it is really an extended meditation on a variety of topics: the (un)reliability of memory, the meaning of education, the way members of families see one another, and the crushing impact of the dictatorship years on generations past and present. Translator Adam Morris deftly renders Bracher’s conversational style, chasing Gustavo as he skips from one topic to another, lost in the haze of memory. - Andrea Shah —World Literature Today
Recently, I reviewed
My German Brother (O Irmão Alemão) by Chico Buarque and was dissatisfied with its use of deflection as a means of resolution. Also slated for release this summer in English translation, Beatriz Bracher’s 2004 novel
I Didn’t Talk (Não Falei) is its counterpart, in many ways the book I wished that Chico Buarque had written. As far as setting and background, they are two extremely similar texts: both view Brazil’s 1964 coup d’etat and subsequent totalitarian regime retrospectively, reflecting on the impact of the authoritarian regime and its tortures on family structures from the perspective of old men who lived through dark times. However, like two brothers raised in seemingly the same household but diverging in identity, setting is just about the only thing shared between these two texts. Where Buarque’s protagonist Ciccio shuns self-awareness and self-reflection and is painfully emotionally dissociative, Beatriz Bracher’s protagonist Gustavo becomes aware of his own dissociative tendencies and begins to address his past and work through his shame and traumatic experiences under torture.
I Didn’t Talk is a cheeky and patient book, gently confronting pain without sacrificing wit, a book which merges together a fraught past and an uncertain future.
Structurally, the book is a chapterless journal which splices together the diary entries of a man confronting his past with quotes, excerpts and impressions from a number of sources--family journal entries, songs, poems, an imaginatively over-the-top novel his brother José is writing that is loosely based on their childhood. The protagonist Gustavo, a pragmatic man who realizes he is often perceived as not-present among even his own family, is contrasted by his radical, well-loved, free-willed brother-in-law Armando. Both men find themselves seized as political prisoners by the government and are tortured for information. Gustavo survives, Armando dies. As a result, Gustavo faces decades of shame that festers until he confronts his past in preparation for an interview with a writer who is exploring the role of education during the Brazilian regime. He is initially hesitant to agree to the interview, out of concern that his own story is insignificant or deviant from what he believes to be the common narrative, and that he will have to face his past. Gustavo grapples with the fear that he somehow betrayed Armando, or didn’t do enough in protecting Armando, that he was responsible for the grief and deaths of numerous family members following Armando’s death.
Gustavo often returns to the idea of the subjectivity of history--how his siblings can possess such disparate accounts of their childhood, or how he knows himself to have resisted selling out Armando, yet is blamed (or believes so) for Armando’s death. He often returns to the question of, “If someone sings a song yet no one is there to sing it with him, does it truly matter whether or not he sang the song?” The collective history of a time misses so many nuances of individual experience -- we can aggregate documents to form a general impression of what it was like then, for that group of people, but in doing so, we inevitably miss the quietly diverging experiences of individuals. This aggregation distorts individual experiences into a history which is almost certain to diverge from the broad range of possibility and emotion of a given circumstance. Structurally, I Didn’t Talk is an aggregation of impressions of a time that form a collective history, yet through which Gustavo is able to regain his control over his life story and become the predominant voice. No excerpted material in the text goes uncommented--this is Gustavo’s method of curating his own story for himself.
It is common, when faced with overwhelming social injustices and corruption that are outside individual control, to feel shame with regards to “doing enough”. Many actions a person can take--protesting, voting, signing petitions--may in result be inconsequential and ineffectual, but serve to assuage a person’s conscience. Which is not to say that these are purposeless, or to dissuade anyone from engaging in these actions, but rather that they are granted perhaps undue significance compared with the range of human decision-making. This is also not to say that there is a dichotomy between personal and political spheres. There is, however, some notion of irony in that the louder the voice with regards to the political, the more easily it fades into the noise of the spectacle. Among the multitudes of voices, a hyped-up collective narrative of a time arises to obscure individual and personal experiences. The selfish concern given to what a person could have or should have done to ease their own burden of responsibility can occupy enormous amounts of time, to the point that it inhibits the ability of a person to be present in the personal realm. The day-to-day seems to dissipate behind the loud and blatant voices of opposition or power. However, there is power in subtlety--when truth and meaning become indecipherable in the noise of the collective narrative, the personal realm arises as a sphere of control and understanding. Sacrifice of self may feel noble, may be disruptive for a time, but from a utilitarian perspective often makes for better storytelling than to shift societal norms and institute change. Personal, subtle power is that which erodes a landscape over time, molding it more permanently, shaping it toward the cultural values that are intergenerational and constitute the structure of a society.
It is one thing to be a martyr, to be a Jim Casy or Sydney Carton. It’s another thing to choose to go on, to live. Often, the most subversive thing a person can do is to willfully and adamantly live. By live, I mean to engage in and embrace the full spectrum of human experience, rather than to simply subsist. The human experience is not merely eating, breathing, and shitting, but to have emotional connections and relationships, to discover and learn, to begin to fathom what your place is in the larger context of humanity. To be a small part of a greater whole. Gustavo goes on to become an educator, and in doing so, creates impacts that are subversive even when they have no intent to be. Ultimately, although corrupted by goals of money-making and conditioning, the function of education is to learn how to be a human. Education asks its students to place themselves in the sequence of the massive discoveries of mathematics and science, to be a part of it and to absorb and utilize the work that has been done by the people who preceded them. Education asks its students to consider the events that culminated in their own current position, to feel small, to communicate their own experiences to others and find common ground, to question what they know and progress. Bracher is able to incorporate a number of beautiful anecdotes into Gustavo’s narrative, notably to me: where a teacher is successful in education is often when they are able to experience that awe of reliving the initial moment of discovery vicariously. Teaching, in this sense is not an act of charity, but of embodiment. The most contagious of passions are not given, but are shared.
When Gustavo chooses to educate, he does so partially out of an impulse to taxonomize and categorize the world as a means of making sense of it. After facing traumatic circumstances, the mind desires to make sense of things and seeks comfort in dichotomies and categories that will simply and neatly divide the world into structure. While comfortable, this thinking pattern can act to the detriment of a person’s psyche, as it eliminates nuance and glosses over the idea that meanings and objects often elude classification and alter contextually. He is inhibited by his careful analysis of the etymology of words, organizing them by structure and history, often deflecting from his own thoughts by intellectualizing over words. Gustavo views words as relics of the past, although he becomes more and more aware that he has been more concerned with the origins of language rather than its present function and potential. Here arises an interesting double entendre of the titular phrase “I didn’t talk”, referring not only to his past during interrogations, but also to his present inhibitions in being able to fully connect with others and speak freely without concern over words.
Given that this is a book that is fundamentally concerned with language and can often dive into nuances of Portuguese, Adam Morris boldly rises to the occasion of addressing specific Portuguese linguistic nuances--linguistic eccentricities so seemingly specific that I’m contemplating buying a Portuguese copy purely because I’m confused how he managed to translate certain passages so smoothly. Morris becomes a vocal character in the text, providing distinct personality and interacting with the readers. Morris’s decision to insert himself into the text and address the reader directly is a decision I might have found to be annoying had the book not been so concerned with storytelling and language, yet for this particular text his method of translation is well-suited. The result is necessarily unique from the Portuguese original, but it adds a supplementary layer of meaning rather than detracting from the book’s inquiries and impact.
Gustavo’s taxonomical relationship to language is reflective of his relationship to his own life, being stuck in the past, struggling to accept the past for what it was and embrace the present moment. However,
I Didn’t Talk is a redemption tale. Gustavo is redeemed in his acceptance of the past’s events as history, while freeing himself from dictating his future by his history, and instead choosing emotional progress. It is his own personal education on how to negotiate dichotomies such as history and progress, as well as collective history and personal history, and find the space in which these concepts coexist. As a redemption tale concerning a man who is coping with addressing life-altering circumstances without an easy target for blame aside from a totalitarian regime, I Didn’t Talk is a kind of parallel to Milan Kundera’s
The Joke. Kundera’s protagonist Ludvik seeks vengeance on those who had a hand in his forced internment; Gustavo turns his anger inward, onto his own self. The setbacks accrued from decades of shame and anger, detachment and vengeance, cannot be resolved except by passing through them, onward, realizing the pointlessness of such concerns. Bracher’s Gustavo and Kundera’s Ludvik are redeemed by the simplicity of accepting that the past happened but it does not dictate the present.
The world does not demand greatness of us, nor even blamelessness. In fact, it demands nothing. Empires will continue to rise and fall, pain and devastation will continue. Humans will continue to adapt, distract, and love. No difference is made to the mind of the world whether or not we as individuals act nobly or assume responsibility. Instead, the question of redemption is a personal one--whether to fully accept the range of experiences offered by life, or not. -
Katherine Beaman
—Commonplace Review
At the protest that weekend against immigrant detention and family separation, the critic looked around at the crowd. Mostly white faces, middle-aged people holding signs as they listened to younger voices, the featured speakers, some of whom spoke in Spanish from the small stage at the center of the park downtown.
There were creative statements—a woman in an Army green jacket with the words “I do care” painted on the back in stark white letters, someone shuffling about in an inflatable T. rex costume. Several counter-protestors at the fringes were shouting, with bike cops standing guard. A bit like a street festival, but with fewer stoned smiles, the critic thought. She left after an hour, feeling guilty as she threaded her way through the crowd, leaving them behind.
Walking to her bus stop, her mind turned to money; namely, the seven-hundred dollars a foreign newspaper had just told her they’d pay her to write a review of Bracher’s novel. She laughed out loud as she read the email from the editor, whom a friend had recommended her to. Somehow she’d finally be making money she could almost live on, a far cry from the thirty dollars she
used to get. “They’re importing culture. You’re a cultural commodity now,” her friend, another critic, had said and laughed, clinking glasses with her to celebrate that night. The critic wasn’t crazy about that label, but there it was.
Waiting for her bus, an older woman came by carrying a protest sign. She looked at the critic’s “Abolish ICE” sign and said out of the blue, with a friendly half-smile, “What do we do now?” The critic smiled back, uncertain if the woman was serious. Her face showed no sign of sarcasm. She looked at the critic as if it were a perfectly natural thing to ask of a comrade after the day’s protest. The critic tried to look the woman in the eye, growing uncomfortable in the lengthening silence. What do we do now? indeed.
While reading Bracher’s book for review, she’d also faced, in print, unusual questions that had come up unexpectedly. One question had appeared as a footnote in the novel: “Is it clear what I’m trying to do here?” After some investigation she learned that the publisher, New Directions, had accidentally printed some of translator Adam Morris’ notes to the editorial team in the advance reader’s copies of the book they’d mailed out.
The critic had read plenty of interviews with translators over time, but had never seen unfiltered material about the translation process in a galley before. “This is one of several direct citations of another writer,” Morris had written. And, “This is in the text but a rare case in which I’d advocate cutting an entire sentence.” These illuminating notes about creating an English version from Bracher’s Portuguese formed a unique subplot that didn’t appear in the finished version of the book.
They also added another slight fracture to an already fractured story about totalitarianism and torture in Brazil last century, which the critic had wanted to find instructive. Did. Felt she should. Because fascism. Old and new. Here and there.
“What do we do now?” The old woman’s post-protest question was also what the narrator of Bracher’s novel, Gustavo, had essentially been asking himself for thirty years.
“Look, I was tortured,” he says to begin his story, “and they say I snitched on a comrade who was later killed by soldiers’ bullets. I didn’t snitch—I almost died in the room where I could have snitched, but I didn’t talk.” The murdered comrade was Armando, his brother-in-law, a childhood friend to whom Gustavo’s family, especially his father and brother, were very close.
Gustavo is deaf in one ear and lost teeth when he was tortured. But he’s suffered most greatly in mental anguish under the suspicions of others since he was rounded up as a revolutionary in São Paolo in the late 1960’s, and hasn’t received any counseling or therapy to speak of. At age sixty-five, looking back on his life, he’s adrift in the evidence of history. After a career as a linguistics professor—a key detail for someone obsessed with proving to everyone he knows that he did or didn’t say certain things in certain ways to certain people long ago—he’s leaving his family home for the next phase of his life.
With all his belongings unpacked, he’s stuck in time looking back, physically surrounded by boxes of papers and journals from his friends and family, which Bracher interjects into the text, as if Gustavo is scrap-booking, looking for bits of proof that he’s lived a life he can defend. “Dona Joana’s patterns, Grandma Ana’s school notes, old man Joaquim’s draft of minutes and manifestoes, Jussara’s letters, Lígia’s stories, annotations, and outlines; and José’s book.”
There is no true storyline or arc he can find in the mess scattered around him, and Bracher structures the novel in similar fashion, without clear scenes, sections, or guideposts: “Fragments of life in no particular order, awaiting imagination, or a need, or whatever might sew them together.” The novel’s form is pragmatic, intriguing in its difficulty, because Bracher’s aim is to reveal a person, not a plot. By the end the pieces seemed to be arranged with great sophistication. Gustavo was realistically vague, broken, loyal, angry, disappointing, brilliant, and unknowable.
The system of anecdotes and interruptions, polyphony of voices and interjections from people who aren’t identified until several pages later, wind around the central core of Gustavo’s guilt about Armando’s death, all of which Morris handles superbly in English. “Bracher knows how to make you love and hate someone simultaneously,” the critic wrote for her review in the far-away newspaper, and wasn’t surprised when it was used as a pull-quote.
Gustavo says that, in the early ’60s, before the dictatorship took power, he only “wrote violent articles”, mostly as an intellectual exercise. “They existed, our enemies, before 1964: the bourgeoisie, poverty, capitalism, ignorance, oppression.” After the coup, however, “We were mobilized, taking people in, hiding guns, debating what kind of revolution it would be.”
He claims that his brother-in-law Armando was more militant — he “participated in a kidnapping and bank robbery, he laundered money, he prepared safe houses for fugitives” — and Gusvato admits at one point, “I was probably taken prisoner because of him.” The two men were among the thousands of Brazilians arrested, tortured, raped, and killed while resisting the military dictatorship that overthrew the government in 1964. Afterwards, “Soldiers, the secret police, Operation Bandeirantes, the prisons of constituted power,” ruled for more than twenty years, thanks to coordination and financial support from other countries, especially the United States and France, with their interests, still very much alive, in the destabilization of South America.
Adding further agony to his grief and guilt is the fact that Gustavo was married to Armando’s sister, Eliana, and she also died, soon after Armando’s death and Gustavo’s release from prison. She’d been sent to Paris for her safety, but succumbed, at just twenty-five, to pneumonia. At her grave, Gustavo notes she lived from 1945 to 1970. “When Eliana died next it was an earthquake. Mother, Jussara, and I steadied ourselves in the doorframes to keep from collapsing all at once, to prevent the whole earth from swallowing us whole.” Facing his family, including his younger sister, Jussara, his younger brother, José, and his parents in the years after he was released and allowed to go back to work teaching, he was tormented most by the thought that during his last phone call with Eliana, she may have still believed he had betrayed Armando. “I didn’t talk, and it’s just as though I did. I know this, I know that you understood this right away,” he says, as if she is still listening, perhaps waiting for a confession he can’t deliver.
Gustavo depends on others for forgiveness, which connects him intrinsically with other people. But Bracher doesn’t portray him as a noble victim, even if he was on the right side of history. His younger brother, José, was a memoirist who, somewhat conveniently, wrote extensively about their family. Reading José’s manuscripts, pieces of which appear throughout the book, seeing “the rest of us described like this, constructed by my brother’s gaze,” Gustavo remembers how José left Brazil for much of his life, returning only to visit occasionally. We learn that José is gay and Gustavo teased him about this when they were boys. His homophobia and cruelty haunt him, combined with the loss of the relationship he might have had with his brother. And whether it’s true guilt or not, Gustavo equates the times he cruelly taunted his brother with “the pleasure of the man who beat me and administered the shocks,” when he was prison: “Along with the pain came an immense shame: I had known that pleasure.”
Gustavo endures more deep pain, after the regime ends, especially related to Renato, Armando’s son. One of the accidental footnotes from the translator reads, “I will return to this. It’s hard to translate a teenager’s attempt at rap.” We learn that Gustavo raised Renato as his own, but that he, too, also died very young, younger than Armando was when he was killed. “Renato never reached his father’s age. He died drunk when he drove his car into a post.” The critic noted how Morris neatly renders this tragic death in a terse, triple alliterative, and the way “drove” carries assonance over to the final word “post,” the object that ends Renato’s life. The rap Morris refers to was something Gustavo found in a journal of Renato’s he couldn’t bear to throw away, another guilty reminder of failure: he let Armando’s son, die, too. Gustavo doesn’t address that Renato’s death was likely related to alcoholism brought on by his father’s murder.
Gustavo finds little to no peace. He does say that shortly after Armando died his father offered him a reason to forgive himself. Gustavo brushes it off at the time almost coldly, intent on staying angry with the regime, as if no one who survived the violence should forgive themselves for letting it happen. He didn’t accept his father’s reprieve, the only one anyone has given him, but he remembers it.
“What do we do now?” the woman had asked after the protest. Seeing the woman reminded the critic of her mother, who was nearing seventy. Her father had been dead more than five years now. Life was going on. No other tragedies had struck their family since. They were lucky, considering. But stories about people in jail were getting closer to home. Every day they had to ask, What now?
The woman’s question was sound. It was small and large. An urge toward solidarity, indicating that the woman wasn’t satisfied, she wanted more, and had the energy and will to engage someone else. “I guess we stick together, right?” the critic had said to the woman, feeling inadequate the minute she said the words. She’d also meant:
remember who we are, who we’re with, what we want to accomplish together. The woman had nodded and walked on.
“Reality is not transformed within the work of art, it’s transformed by the work,” Bracher wrote. “Each reader, spectator, or listener becomes an armed agent of the transformation.”
The critic got on the bus a few minutes later with the other sweaty, annoyed passengers. How, if at all, will we be remembered? Will people judge us fairly? What monument will represent what we lived through? Maybe all that would linger, would be a question like the woman’s, or one like Morris’s. “Is it clear what I’m trying to do here?”
Gustavo had said several times he hated having to make a story, that lives don’t really fit into stories. He wanted something else to remain:
If it were possible. My story perceived as a rumbling, without words, without voice, but incorporated whole, solid. In fact, that’s how things are. Our image of the world is the sum of various rumors, reverberations of the steps we do and do not take: they pass through us. There is no alibi, no way to repair the story that we end up with.
- Matthew Jakubowski
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/paper-monument-an-experimental-review/
