Violence (“Violência”), the new novel by Fernando Bonassi, is a raw and brutal synthesis of Brazil. With irony and precision, its plot and characters portray the political and social violence of a nation built on colonial legacies.
It’s Saturday night when a political advisor receives a writer and his wife, a university professor, at his home. The advisor’s aim in inviting them to dinner is to get the writer’s support for his candidate’s campaign. But an armed robbery surprises everyone and reveals the deepest layers of violence that permeate Brazilian daily life – physical, political, sexual, racial, class, and gender. With a raw and brutal narrative that takes place over a weekend, Violence portrays a Brazil built on slavery, prejudice and social inequality.
The short chapters hiss at the hypocrisies, privileges and vices of the dominant political class; at police corruption and brutality, as well as their vulnerability; at domestic, political and prison racism, from its most subtle manifestation to the one that kills. Once again, Fernando Bonassi constructs a plot that is extremely critical of the current structures of power and control, with a comic narrative and strong cinematographic content, and striking characters that are extremely recognisable to the Brazilian imagination.
Without shying away from the brutalities, complexities and social contradictions, the book concludes a kind of trilogy by the author, which also includes Lust and Degeneration.

Anyone who wants to understand, in depth, Brazil following the military dictatorship, has to read Fernando Bonassi’s coherent and prolific work. Since his first books, in the early 1990s, Bonassi has recorded, in novels and short stories and plays, the various setbacks we have gone through, with the privileged and critical eye of someone who knows Brazilian society in their guts. Possessing an unmistakable voice in contemporary literature, Bonassi has chosen the suburb – the title of one of his most important novels – as the location for his books. This suburb, portrayed in the excellent Lust, published in 2015, and to which he returns here in this magnificent Degeneration (“Degeneração”)– a decadent suburb of São Paulo, like all other Brazilian suburbs, inhabited by a lower middle class that struggles with all weapons at its disposal to survive, harassed by brutality and lack of prospects.
Degeneration is almost a natural unfolding of Lust. In the latter, the author portrayed a family who, believing that access to material goods would guarantee social recognition, sees euphoria turn to violence. In Degeneração, this violence resurfaces even more crudely when we follow the saga of the son of a police informant trying to release his father’s body for cremation, during the weekend in which the election that put the extreme right in power is held. Terrifying metaphor – the inside, the outside, the private, the public – everything flows into the cul-de-sac in which we collectively find ourselves. (Luiz Ruffato)

Fernando Bonassi’s novel Lust (”Luxúria”) gives an account of an unnamed man who, inspired by a glossy magazine and to impress his wife, decides to crown his self-assumed wealth by building a swimming pool – on credit and in the garden of his dwarf-sized house in a social housing area. Little by little, like a chain reaction, the absurd building process exposes not only the drain pipes of the neighbourhood but also the gaping abysms of everyday bourgeois life. In debt, harassed, jobless and driven by his own demons, he tries to kill his dog before he finds a final solution for his family and himself.
Lust is a parable of the nation’s circumstances: the “new Brazilian middle class”, taken completely by surprise by their unexpected wealth, staggers head-on and without any moderation into the entirely foreseeable crisis. In relentlessly sober language, as if set in harshly exposed photographs and bold camera shots, Bonassi meticulously illuminates the lives of his protagonists. A fast-paced, disturbing novel that keeps the reader glued to his seat.

Bonassi – I do not write to entertain, I write to disturb myself and my reader – is unafraid to express, in verbal and written form, how he sees society in his country and the people in his city. His novel Suburb (“Subúrbio”) was one of the very first books to come from and deal with the world of the bleak suburbs which has long since reached the city centres. High walls, electronic barriers are of little use any more. The world of the privileged few can no longer cut itself off. What sort of a world is this, asks Bonassi, which constructs such walls, instead of confronting and combating misery, showing these people a way out. The novel A Sky full of Stars (“Um Céu de Estrelas”) was made into a prize-winning film by Brazilian director Tata Amaral. That he can also be entertaining he demonstrates in the crime story Marital Crimes (“Crimes Conjugais”), an exciting, briskly moving story of big city crime.

The novel Counterevidence (“Prova Contrária”) tells the story of a woman who receives an indemnization from the government since her husband supposedly disappeared after having been tortured by the military regime. One day her husband returns… was he really the political hero his wife had believed him to be?

The Boy Trapped in a Fridge (“O Menino Preso na Geladeira”) has experienced nothing but privation and hollow promises by a corrupt government in a destroyed country. He therefore builds himself a large fully equipped fridge and locks himself in, as to isolate himself from the outside world. After a number of crazy coincidents, however, he suddenly becomes a national anti-hero. This is an absurd story, which seems to take place very far away, in truth, however, portrays a well-known reality.