Words Without Borders

Oct 1st, 2013

On Free City, by João Almino

Ksenija Bilbija (*)

While Brasilia, the only city built in the XX century to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is undoubtedly designed to captivate the eye of the viewer, João Almino’s novel Free City, about the building of the Brazilian capital, is masterfully written to capture the I of the reader.
This skillfully designed and richly symbolic narrative tells the story of one of the workers who comes to the site in order to help erect the city of the future and who is murdered the day after its official inauguration. The tale is set in a rich historical context: names such as the country’s president Juscelino Kubitschek who envisioned the capital in the geographic center of the country and ordered its construction, Bernardo Sayão, an engineer who oversaw the construction of the city, vice-governor of the state and also the first person to be buried at the Brasilia’s cemetery thus marking it in the map of dead, along with world renown writers such as Aldous Huxley or Elizabeth Bishop who at one point visited this city in the making, freely meander through the narrative giving it the flavor of a historical account and increasing its verisimilitude. Story and history, the fictional and the real, while separated in the English language, friendly coexist in the Portuguese word história. With yet another particularity: the first letter, the h, is to never be pronounced, never given voice. So, one can reflect, when memory tells stories and histories, when notes turn into blogs and autobiographies become novels, something is always silenced. The unspeakable and the unutterable are embedded in every história, be it an imaginary tale or, the historical account. The h stands for the stories that never find their way into histories, versions that keep multiplying, never allowing the final one to fully take a position of authority. They are voiceless stories, but not speechless ones.
Free City is a foundational palimpsest set within the frame of the forty some months (1956-1960) that it took for the most modern capital in the world to emerge from the vastness of the Brazilian savanna. It is narrated by João, who after loosing both parents in an accident spends his childhood with an aunt and, unrelated to her, a male figure most likely from another side of the tragedy stricken family. Leaving their previous lives behind, they all move to Free City, a new and disposable site created for the temporary life of the builders of the capital. Years later, now a young man, João is trying to reconstruct some threads of that part of the story of his life. And one of those threads is a murder mystery involving a family friend and construction worker in which his father could have been involved. João has some saved newspaper clippings, personal memories, accounts from other family members and, most importantly, explanations from the only father figure known to him, now in jail and on his death bed. The novel is structured around the seven nights that João spends talking to his father, referred to as Dad, and it engages the reader on multiple levels, mainly because it formally presents itself as a revision of a blog that João at one point made available to internet visitors. In that sense, the novel that the reader actually has in his or her hands, the one entitled Free City is a series of textual vibrations that reflect and deflect each other’s surface, an authentic journey of the drifting self in search of its own others, past, present and time to come. Not only do other bloggers comment on the text’s historical inaccuracies and insufficiencies, but there is also a character called João Almino, the writer who is asked to read it and revise it, but ultimately his numerous suggestions are mostly refuted and rejected. It is as if João is trying to find his true self somewhere beyond language, beyond accounts that claim historical accuracy as well as those relaying on imagination that a writer-character like João Almino, could bring to him. And yet, what he seems to realize (how else could we explain his urge to publish his narrative even if it meant selling his car in order to cover the expenses?) is that the ‘authentic’ self does not exist prior to writing. It is linguistically conjured-up, brought to existence through language.
All this notwithstanding, Free City is a novel about redemption. On the one side the issues of authorial power played in the novel are invoking Roland Barthes’ post-structuralist pronouncement of the death of the author who, as opposed to the “modern scriptor” exists in relation to the text as a prior instance that made it up and who, after the book has reached its readers, dies. João opens himself to the readers while trying to keep some authority over the narrative. On the other hand, the novel is also about the real death of a worker, Valdivino, an unexplained and uninvestigated homicide that João is determined to decipher because he realizes that this is a death worth talking about and discussing with implicit and explicit readers. Could it be that this is the information that he is looking for from his readers instead of commas, periods or names of flora and fauna that João Almino and his blog followers readily supply? Could it be that what lies beneath the modernist city and beyond the postmodernist games of authorship, is a body upon which the redemption of the citizens of Brasilia depends?
Longtime readers of Joao Almino’s books will not be at all surprised to learn that Brasilia is the setting of his new novel. After all, those who read Portuguese already know that this is his fifth novel set in the capital of the largest Latin American country. English readers, unfortunately, until now had only two of them at their disposal (The Five Seasons of Love and The Book of Emotions published by Dalkey Archive Press). One can only hope that the translation of the others will soon follow. As for Almino’s Free City, its architecture is nothing short of magnificent.

(*) Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/joaeo-alminos-free-city

Words Without Borders

Oct 1st, 2013

On Free City, by João Almino

Ksenija Bilbija (*)

While Brasilia, the only city built in the XX century to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is undoubtedly designed to captivate the eye of the viewer, João Almino’s novel Free City, about the building of the Brazilian capital, is masterfully written to capture the I of the reader.
This skillfully designed and richly symbolic narrative tells the story of one of the workers who comes to the site in order to help erect the city of the future and who is murdered the day after its official inauguration. The tale is set in a rich historical context: names such as the country’s president Juscelino Kubitschek who envisioned the capital in the geographic center of the country and ordered its construction, Bernardo Sayão, an engineer who oversaw the construction of the city, vice-governor of the state and also the first person to be buried at the Brasilia’s cemetery thus marking it in the map of dead, along with world renown writers such as Aldous Huxley or Elizabeth Bishop who at one point visited this city in the making, freely meander through the narrative giving it the flavor of a historical account and increasing its verisimilitude. Story and history, the fictional and the real, while separated in the English language, friendly coexist in the Portuguese word história. With yet another particularity: the first letter, the h, is to never be pronounced, never given voice. So, one can reflect, when memory tells stories and histories, when notes turn into blogs and autobiographies become novels, something is always silenced. The unspeakable and the unutterable are embedded in every história, be it an imaginary tale or, the historical account. The h stands for the stories that never find their way into histories, versions that keep multiplying, never allowing the final one to fully take a position of authority. They are voiceless stories, but not speechless ones.
Free City is a foundational palimpsest set within the frame of the forty some months (1956-1960) that it took for the most modern capital in the world to emerge from the vastness of the Brazilian savanna. It is narrated by João, who after loosing both parents in an accident spends his childhood with an aunt and, unrelated to her, a male figure most likely from another side of the tragedy stricken family. Leaving their previous lives behind, they all move to Free City, a new and disposable site created for the temporary life of the builders of the capital. Years later, now a young man, João is trying to reconstruct some threads of that part of the story of his life. And one of those threads is a murder mystery involving a family friend and construction worker in which his father could have been involved. João has some saved newspaper clippings, personal memories, accounts from other family members and, most importantly, explanations from the only father figure known to him, now in jail and on his death bed. The novel is structured around the seven nights that João spends talking to his father, referred to as Dad, and it engages the reader on multiple levels, mainly because it formally presents itself as a revision of a blog that João at one point made available to internet visitors. In that sense, the novel that the reader actually has in his or her hands, the one entitled Free City is a series of textual vibrations that reflect and deflect each other’s surface, an authentic journey of the drifting self in search of its own others, past, present and time to come. Not only do other bloggers comment on the text’s historical inaccuracies and insufficiencies, but there is also a character called João Almino, the writer who is asked to read it and revise it, but ultimately his numerous suggestions are mostly refuted and rejected. It is as if João is trying to find his true self somewhere beyond language, beyond accounts that claim historical accuracy as well as those relaying on imagination that a writer-character like João Almino, could bring to him. And yet, what he seems to realize (how else could we explain his urge to publish his narrative even if it meant selling his car in order to cover the expenses?) is that the ‘authentic’ self does not exist prior to writing. It is linguistically conjured-up, brought to existence through language.
All this notwithstanding, Free City is a novel about redemption. On the one side the issues of authorial power played in the novel are invoking Roland Barthes’ post-structuralist pronouncement of the death of the author who, as opposed to the “modern scriptor” exists in relation to the text as a prior instance that made it up and who, after the book has reached its readers, dies. João opens himself to the readers while trying to keep some authority over the narrative. On the other hand, the novel is also about the real death of a worker, Valdivino, an unexplained and uninvestigated homicide that João is determined to decipher because he realizes that this is a death worth talking about and discussing with implicit and explicit readers. Could it be that this is the information that he is looking for from his readers instead of commas, periods or names of flora and fauna that João Almino and his blog followers readily supply? Could it be that what lies beneath the modernist city and beyond the postmodernist games of authorship, is a body upon which the redemption of the citizens of Brasilia depends?
Longtime readers of Joao Almino’s books will not be at all surprised to learn that Brasilia is the setting of his new novel. After all, those who read Portuguese already know that this is his fifth novel set in the capital of the largest Latin American country. English readers, unfortunately, until now had only two of them at their disposal (The Five Seasons of Love and The Book of Emotions published by Dalkey Archive Press). One can only hope that the translation of the others will soon follow. As for Almino’s Free City, its architecture is nothing short of magnificent.

(*) Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/joaeo-alminos-free-city

Words Without Borders

Oct 1st, 2013

On Free City, by João Almino

Ksenija Bilbija (*)

While Brasilia, the only city built in the XX century to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is undoubtedly designed to captivate the eye of the viewer, João Almino’s novel Free City, about the building of the Brazilian capital, is masterfully written to capture the I of the reader.
This skillfully designed and richly symbolic narrative tells the story of one of the workers who comes to the site in order to help erect the city of the future and who is murdered the day after its official inauguration. The tale is set in a rich historical context: names such as the country’s president Juscelino Kubitschek who envisioned the capital in the geographic center of the country and ordered its construction, Bernardo Sayão, an engineer who oversaw the construction of the city, vice-governor of the state and also the first person to be buried at the Brasilia’s cemetery thus marking it in the map of dead, along with world renown writers such as Aldous Huxley or Elizabeth Bishop who at one point visited this city in the making, freely meander through the narrative giving it the flavor of a historical account and increasing its verisimilitude. Story and history, the fictional and the real, while separated in the English language, friendly coexist in the Portuguese word história. With yet another particularity: the first letter, the h, is to never be pronounced, never given voice. So, one can reflect, when memory tells stories and histories, when notes turn into blogs and autobiographies become novels, something is always silenced. The unspeakable and the unutterable are embedded in every história, be it an imaginary tale or, the historical account. The h stands for the stories that never find their way into histories, versions that keep multiplying, never allowing the final one to fully take a position of authority. They are voiceless stories, but not speechless ones.
Free City is a foundational palimpsest set within the frame of the forty some months (1956-1960) that it took for the most modern capital in the world to emerge from the vastness of the Brazilian savanna. It is narrated by João, who after loosing both parents in an accident spends his childhood with an aunt and, unrelated to her, a male figure most likely from another side of the tragedy stricken family. Leaving their previous lives behind, they all move to Free City, a new and disposable site created for the temporary life of the builders of the capital. Years later, now a young man, João is trying to reconstruct some threads of that part of the story of his life. And one of those threads is a murder mystery involving a family friend and construction worker in which his father could have been involved. João has some saved newspaper clippings, personal memories, accounts from other family members and, most importantly, explanations from the only father figure known to him, now in jail and on his death bed. The novel is structured around the seven nights that João spends talking to his father, referred to as Dad, and it engages the reader on multiple levels, mainly because it formally presents itself as a revision of a blog that João at one point made available to internet visitors. In that sense, the novel that the reader actually has in his or her hands, the one entitled Free City is a series of textual vibrations that reflect and deflect each other’s surface, an authentic journey of the drifting self in search of its own others, past, present and time to come. Not only do other bloggers comment on the text’s historical inaccuracies and insufficiencies, but there is also a character called João Almino, the writer who is asked to read it and revise it, but ultimately his numerous suggestions are mostly refuted and rejected. It is as if João is trying to find his true self somewhere beyond language, beyond accounts that claim historical accuracy as well as those relaying on imagination that a writer-character like João Almino, could bring to him. And yet, what he seems to realize (how else could we explain his urge to publish his narrative even if it meant selling his car in order to cover the expenses?) is that the ‘authentic’ self does not exist prior to writing. It is linguistically conjured-up, brought to existence through language.
All this notwithstanding, Free City is a novel about redemption. On the one side the issues of authorial power played in the novel are invoking Roland Barthes’ post-structuralist pronouncement of the death of the author who, as opposed to the “modern scriptor” exists in relation to the text as a prior instance that made it up and who, after the book has reached its readers, dies. João opens himself to the readers while trying to keep some authority over the narrative. On the other hand, the novel is also about the real death of a worker, Valdivino, an unexplained and uninvestigated homicide that João is determined to decipher because he realizes that this is a death worth talking about and discussing with implicit and explicit readers. Could it be that this is the information that he is looking for from his readers instead of commas, periods or names of flora and fauna that João Almino and his blog followers readily supply? Could it be that what lies beneath the modernist city and beyond the postmodernist games of authorship, is a body upon which the redemption of the citizens of Brasilia depends?
Longtime readers of Joao Almino’s books will not be at all surprised to learn that Brasilia is the setting of his new novel. After all, those who read Portuguese already know that this is his fifth novel set in the capital of the largest Latin American country. English readers, unfortunately, until now had only two of them at their disposal (The Five Seasons of Love and The Book of Emotions published by Dalkey Archive Press). One can only hope that the translation of the others will soon follow. As for Almino’s Free City, its architecture is nothing short of magnificent.

(*) Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/joaeo-alminos-free-city

Words Without Borders

Oct 1st, 2013

On Free City, by João Almino

Ksenija Bilbija (*)

While Brasilia, the only city built in the XX century to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is undoubtedly designed to captivate the eye of the viewer, João Almino’s novel Free City, about the building of the Brazilian capital, is masterfully written to capture the I of the reader.
This skillfully designed and richly symbolic narrative tells the story of one of the workers who comes to the site in order to help erect the city of the future and who is murdered the day after its official inauguration. The tale is set in a rich historical context: names such as the country’s president Juscelino Kubitschek who envisioned the capital in the geographic center of the country and ordered its construction, Bernardo Sayão, an engineer who oversaw the construction of the city, vice-governor of the state and also the first person to be buried at the Brasilia’s cemetery thus marking it in the map of dead, along with world renown writers such as Aldous Huxley or Elizabeth Bishop who at one point visited this city in the making, freely meander through the narrative giving it the flavor of a historical account and increasing its verisimilitude. Story and history, the fictional and the real, while separated in the English language, friendly coexist in the Portuguese word história. With yet another particularity: the first letter, the h, is to never be pronounced, never given voice. So, one can reflect, when memory tells stories and histories, when notes turn into blogs and autobiographies become novels, something is always silenced. The unspeakable and the unutterable are embedded in every história, be it an imaginary tale or, the historical account. The h stands for the stories that never find their way into histories, versions that keep multiplying, never allowing the final one to fully take a position of authority. They are voiceless stories, but not speechless ones.
Free City is a foundational palimpsest set within the frame of the forty some months (1956-1960) that it took for the most modern capital in the world to emerge from the vastness of the Brazilian savanna. It is narrated by João, who after loosing both parents in an accident spends his childhood with an aunt and, unrelated to her, a male figure most likely from another side of the tragedy stricken family. Leaving their previous lives behind, they all move to Free City, a new and disposable site created for the temporary life of the builders of the capital. Years later, now a young man, João is trying to reconstruct some threads of that part of the story of his life. And one of those threads is a murder mystery involving a family friend and construction worker in which his father could have been involved. João has some saved newspaper clippings, personal memories, accounts from other family members and, most importantly, explanations from the only father figure known to him, now in jail and on his death bed. The novel is structured around the seven nights that João spends talking to his father, referred to as Dad, and it engages the reader on multiple levels, mainly because it formally presents itself as a revision of a blog that João at one point made available to internet visitors. In that sense, the novel that the reader actually has in his or her hands, the one entitled Free City is a series of textual vibrations that reflect and deflect each other’s surface, an authentic journey of the drifting self in search of its own others, past, present and time to come. Not only do other bloggers comment on the text’s historical inaccuracies and insufficiencies, but there is also a character called João Almino, the writer who is asked to read it and revise it, but ultimately his numerous suggestions are mostly refuted and rejected. It is as if João is trying to find his true self somewhere beyond language, beyond accounts that claim historical accuracy as well as those relaying on imagination that a writer-character like João Almino, could bring to him. And yet, what he seems to realize (how else could we explain his urge to publish his narrative even if it meant selling his car in order to cover the expenses?) is that the ‘authentic’ self does not exist prior to writing. It is linguistically conjured-up, brought to existence through language.
All this notwithstanding, Free City is a novel about redemption. On the one side the issues of authorial power played in the novel are invoking Roland Barthes’ post-structuralist pronouncement of the death of the author who, as opposed to the “modern scriptor” exists in relation to the text as a prior instance that made it up and who, after the book has reached its readers, dies. João opens himself to the readers while trying to keep some authority over the narrative. On the other hand, the novel is also about the real death of a worker, Valdivino, an unexplained and uninvestigated homicide that João is determined to decipher because he realizes that this is a death worth talking about and discussing with implicit and explicit readers. Could it be that this is the information that he is looking for from his readers instead of commas, periods or names of flora and fauna that João Almino and his blog followers readily supply? Could it be that what lies beneath the modernist city and beyond the postmodernist games of authorship, is a body upon which the redemption of the citizens of Brasilia depends?
Longtime readers of Joao Almino’s books will not be at all surprised to learn that Brasilia is the setting of his new novel. After all, those who read Portuguese already know that this is his fifth novel set in the capital of the largest Latin American country. English readers, unfortunately, until now had only two of them at their disposal (The Five Seasons of Love and The Book of Emotions published by Dalkey Archive Press). One can only hope that the translation of the others will soon follow. As for Almino’s Free City, its architecture is nothing short of magnificent.

(*) Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/joaeo-alminos-free-city