TOTALLYDUBLIN, ARTS AND CULTURE
LITERARY REVIEW, MARCH
March 3, 2014
Free City
João Almino
[Dalkey Archive Press]
João Almino’s fifth novel takes as its subject the construction of Brasília. It is not a tight novel. Paragraphs speed past with only commas to break them up. Speech and incident coil around one another without quotation marks; it is impossible to tell an event from the comment being made on it. This is Almino’s gift: by sacrificing superficial tightness, he creates something utterly mimetic of its subject-matter. Almino’s narrative avatar has begun a blog in order to resist the accusation of being ‘reactionary’ and to exorcise the ghost of his estranged father. While initially inviting the input of commenters, he soon starts suppressing any material running counter to his own version of events. He would prefer to tell the construction of Brasília as a picaresque loss-of-innocence story, Salman Rushdie-style, with the map of the city and the map of his own consciousness following each other’s lines exactly. Elisions and suppressions can never be complete though, and the narrator inadvertently reveals glimpses of the mass graves and police abuses on which his beloved city is built. Nor does its breathless pace allow for the satisfactions associated with the coming-of-age novel. By coding failure into its structuring principles, Free City points towards the moral failure at the foundations of the city it describes. To tell the story of a city which is not a city, one needs a novel which is not a novel: Almino’s text is precisely that novel.
– Tim Smyth
TOTALLYDUBLIN, ARTS AND CULTURE
LITERARY REVIEW, MARCH
March 3, 2014
Free City
João Almino
[Dalkey Archive Press]
João Almino’s fifth novel takes as its subject the construction of Brasília. It is not a tight novel. Paragraphs speed past with only commas to break them up. Speech and incident coil around one another without quotation marks; it is impossible to tell an event from the comment being made on it. This is Almino’s gift: by sacrificing superficial tightness, he creates something utterly mimetic of its subject-matter. Almino’s narrative avatar has begun a blog in order to resist the accusation of being ‘reactionary’ and to exorcise the ghost of his estranged father. While initially inviting the input of commenters, he soon starts suppressing any material running counter to his own version of events. He would prefer to tell the construction of Brasília as a picaresque loss-of-innocence story, Salman Rushdie-style, with the map of the city and the map of his own consciousness following each other’s lines exactly. Elisions and suppressions can never be complete though, and the narrator inadvertently reveals glimpses of the mass graves and police abuses on which his beloved city is built. Nor does its breathless pace allow for the satisfactions associated with the coming-of-age novel. By coding failure into its structuring principles, Free City points towards the moral failure at the foundations of the city it describes. To tell the story of a city which is not a city, one needs a novel which is not a novel: Almino’s text is precisely that novel.
– Tim Smyth
TOTALLYDUBLIN, ARTS AND CULTURE
LITERARY REVIEW, MARCH
March 3, 2014
Free City
João Almino
[Dalkey Archive Press]
João Almino’s fifth novel takes as its subject the construction of Brasília. It is not a tight novel. Paragraphs speed past with only commas to break them up. Speech and incident coil around one another without quotation marks; it is impossible to tell an event from the comment being made on it. This is Almino’s gift: by sacrificing superficial tightness, he creates something utterly mimetic of its subject-matter. Almino’s narrative avatar has begun a blog in order to resist the accusation of being ‘reactionary’ and to exorcise the ghost of his estranged father. While initially inviting the input of commenters, he soon starts suppressing any material running counter to his own version of events. He would prefer to tell the construction of Brasília as a picaresque loss-of-innocence story, Salman Rushdie-style, with the map of the city and the map of his own consciousness following each other’s lines exactly. Elisions and suppressions can never be complete though, and the narrator inadvertently reveals glimpses of the mass graves and police abuses on which his beloved city is built. Nor does its breathless pace allow for the satisfactions associated with the coming-of-age novel. By coding failure into its structuring principles, Free City points towards the moral failure at the foundations of the city it describes. To tell the story of a city which is not a city, one needs a novel which is not a novel: Almino’s text is precisely that novel.
– Tim Smyth
TOTALLYDUBLIN, ARTS AND CULTURE
LITERARY REVIEW, MARCH
March 3, 2014
Free City
João Almino
[Dalkey Archive Press]
João Almino’s fifth novel takes as its subject the construction of Brasília. It is not a tight novel. Paragraphs speed past with only commas to break them up. Speech and incident coil around one another without quotation marks; it is impossible to tell an event from the comment being made on it. This is Almino’s gift: by sacrificing superficial tightness, he creates something utterly mimetic of its subject-matter. Almino’s narrative avatar has begun a blog in order to resist the accusation of being ‘reactionary’ and to exorcise the ghost of his estranged father. While initially inviting the input of commenters, he soon starts suppressing any material running counter to his own version of events. He would prefer to tell the construction of Brasília as a picaresque loss-of-innocence story, Salman Rushdie-style, with the map of the city and the map of his own consciousness following each other’s lines exactly. Elisions and suppressions can never be complete though, and the narrator inadvertently reveals glimpses of the mass graves and police abuses on which his beloved city is built. Nor does its breathless pace allow for the satisfactions associated with the coming-of-age novel. By coding failure into its structuring principles, Free City points towards the moral failure at the foundations of the city it describes. To tell the story of a city which is not a city, one needs a novel which is not a novel: Almino’s text is precisely that novel.
– Tim Smyth
