Ummi (“Ummi. Una historia de la migración palestina”) is an Arabic word which translates as “my mama”. Baboun has chosen to follow her Ummi as she reconstructs her family’s memory, moving freely between memory, chronicle and biography. Her recollections go back to Palestine, her ancestors’ decision to escape, and the struggle to build a new life in distant South America. Baboun lets her own Palestinian, Greek, and Chilean roots transform her novelistic style, using this research as a starting point to navigate the discovery of family secrets and stories. The book is also the story of the author trying to find her own cultural identity in Chile, the country with the largest Palestinian population outside of the Middle East. Reminiscent of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, Isabel Baboun has written with masterclass a book that is as moving as it is unique.

In her novel The Thai Woman (“La tailandesa”), Baboun presents us with Diana, a woman in her forties, at the verge of a turning point of her life. She feels trapped in both her private and professional life, not really connected to nobody and not even to herself and her body. She feels betrayed by Maxi, the man with whom she is living in the same apartment, and by Nancy, her supposed best friend, who snatched a role offer from under her nose and is now the TV starlet she could have been, instead of remaining a teacher at the high school where she has already studied herself. Thai boxing gives her a kick, a glimpse of self-empowerment. But only acting on stage enables her – herself and Moisés, Nancy’s little son with whom Diana “rehearses” a borrowed motherhood – to take a break from reality and to really feel free, to follow only herself without any outer rules, and to be who she really is.
Like Mieko Kawakami, Baboun creates protagonists representing the contemporary woman, delving into different aspects of femininity and maternity, in an always entertaining, witty style and a highly original language. The Thai Woman is a feminist novel of archaic force.

The novel Kid (“Cría”) focuses on the relationship between the narrator Zina and her parents, whose influence she believes she has escaped from in recent years. Zina lives in a small town in southern Chile with Joan, an older American woman, while she pretends to her parents that she is based in California. Her father has repeatedly beaten his wife and daughter and bullied them, and her mother, otherwise self-confident and fun-loving, has never managed to free herself from this situation. When she asks Zina to come home urgently because her father has to undergo heart surgery and could die, Joan encourages Zina to go along with the request, but not to regard it as a return home as her mother would like, but merely as a temporary visit. Zina agrees, but feels an anxiety settle on her chest, a shadow that reminds her of the gloom of her parents’ home. When Zina arrives in Santiago, she is caught up in the margins of the social unrest that shakes Chile in autumn 2019, in particular its capital city after the brutal deployment of security forces on 18 October. These events reflect her father’s violence, from which there also seems to be little escape. Her parents’ influence is revealed to be fully intact when her father’s heart surgery leads to complications that require a partial lung transplant. Ever the good daughter, Zina follows her mother’s pleas to help her father, and her spirit of resistance only stirs when she is being prepared for her own operation and the anaesthesia begins to take effect…

In his latest book, Bicycles in September (“Bicicletas em Setembro”), Baptista-Bastos depicts the cantankerous and lonely Jesuina, an old lady who spent her life looking after children and never left the house. When he dives into the sea of his memories to reconstruct the time when he lived with her, the narrator, Francisco, remembers how he and his group of friends discovered desire. At the same time, he shows Jesuina’s mature sexuality and brings out an interesting sexual tension between the generations – a tension that is frowned upon by her neighbours, isolating her all the more in her separate world. The setting is the neighbourhood of Ajuda in Lisbon, in the 1950s. The social scope of the novel includes Jesuina herself, a strong personality with a vein of mysticism and eccentricity; the neighbours, conservative and rather trivial ladies; children and teenagers; gypsies and other marginalised characters. Bicicletas em Setembro is a poetic reflection on the loneliness of each character, and the implacable mechanisms of memory.

Speaking of Inside Your Absence (“No interior da tua ausência”) José Saramago stated: “A great novel. A magnificent novel.” The novel has won an award from the International Association of Literary Critics, and speaks of the inexorable passage of time – of the sadness of a man who does not accept ageing, who falls in love, who does not care about ridicule, shame or humiliation when he is consumed by jealousy. “This extraordinary book speaks of all of us,” wrote the essayist and academic Maria Alzira Seixo.

His first novel, May your Heart not be disturbed (“No se turbe vuestro corazón”), was recommended for publication by Julio Cortázar himself and talks about the innocence of childhood and the mercilessness of war. Five years later, with his book Shipwreck of the Stars (“El náufrago de las estrellas”), Eduardo Belgrano Rawson had already made a name for himself as one of Argentina’s most brilliant narrators. The novel was awarded the Premio del Club de los Trece. It is a story of tragedy as well as profound love. Belgano Rawson is one of the very few Latin American authors to be compared to great Anglo-Saxon literary figures such as Hemingway and Ondaatje.

Fuegia (Tierra del Fuego) was awarded the Critics’ Prize as best Argentine novel in 1992. Here the author gives an account of the last days of the people on Tierra del Fuego at the beginning of the 20th Century. After being raped, the native Camilena Kippa decides to leave the English Mission with her family. The danger-ous path to their destination, the country of seals, leads through the area of shepherds, the territory of the white intruders. With a language that is simulta-neously austere and poetic, the author depicts the apocalypse of this part of the world. In one of Argentina’s most important newspapers, La Nación, the novel was celebrated as Argentina’s most moving novel of the last decades.

Fuegia is going to be adopted as a documentary. Currently, the author is working on the screen-play.

After Secret News from America (“Noticias secretas de América”), where the author recorded the history of his continent in the way he would have liked to have been introduced to it, he published the novel Setembrada. Although set during the bitter war between the alliance of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against the small country of Paraguay from 1865 to 1870, one is compelled to follow the story, as if it were taking place at present. Belgrano uses short and precise sentences to tell a moving story of love and friendship in war.

In Rosa from Miami (“Rosa de Miami”), the reader is kidnapped to the Caribbean of the 1960s right up to the present, populated with fictional as well as real characters such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Ernest Hemingway. Belgrano Rawson once again mocks all official historiography and instead tells of people who, as victims or culprits or both simultaneously, were involved in these historic events, each in their own personal way.

Belgrano Rawson’s latest novel The Sermon of La Victoria (“El sermón de La Victoria”) tells the riveting tales of Nelson and Jorge’s doomed fates, based on two genuine cases. Nelson is held responsible for a crime he didn’t commit and sent to prison while Jorge’s wife and newborn son disappear during the dictatorship, like so many others. Both become victims of a state that has not yet overcome all the shadows of that time.

Based on actual events, Schizo follows the trayectories of three families from different continents that have survived annihilation in their respective lands and converge in Miami around the unexplained death of an anti-torture activist at the height of GW Bush´s war on terror in 2005.

Nathan Moretti, whose parents fled the Holocaust and emigrated to America, falls in love with Nadia Mimouni, whose own family escaped a brutal colonial war in Algeria and was born in Buenos Aires – where a thir household, the Posadas-Suarez, experienced first-hand the atrocities of Argentina´s civil war in late seventies. Was Nathan´s friend´s untimely death a banal traffic accident or was it the premeditated murder of a potential whistleblower? And if there was foul play, who stands to benefit by his death?

Schizo is a political satire set againts the CIA´s post-9/11 torture program about the chasm between professed values and actual practice, colonial empires doubling as democracies, and the ethical contortions individuals sometimes go through so they can live with themselves.

35 years on from Pinochet’s putsch, the three former exiles Cacho, Lolo and Lucho meet again in Chile. By now they are The Shadow of What We Were (“La sombra de lo que fuimos”): pot-bellied, balding and grey-bearded. Their plan is finally to unearth a treasure the police have never tracked down: the loot from a famous bank robbery that took place in 1925, undertaken by a group of anarchists. Drinking and wallowing in memories of their old revolutionary days, they wait for the fourth man, who should know more about the money. But instead of him, a former friend shows up, telling an incredible story.

Affectionate, funny and with a good pinch of irony, this graphic novel tells the story of a group of tragic heroes who never lose their faith in humour – which is why they end up as winners.

In 1954 Bessa-Luís became famous with the novel The Sibyl (“A Sibila”) which draws a realistic portrait of the rural population of northern Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Considerable psychological astuteness and analytical acuity make this novel a masterpiece of Portuguese literature. In her novels the sexes are separated by traditional gulfs, though these are frequently traversed. The female figures act according to intuition and stand for preservation and permanence. By contrast, the men are interested in bringing about change and accelerating time. The author’s language and narrative technique are reminiscent of Camilo Castelo Branco, the great nineteenth century Portuguese writer. In addition to sensitively portraying characters, Agustina focuses mainly on social and political change in northern Portugal.

Abraham’s Valley (“Vale Abraão”) narrates the life of Ema Cardeano, the only daughter of a father who was widowed early. She seems to find happiness when she marries Carlos Paiva, a mediocre doctor from the countryside. Disenchantment with marriage comes quickly, the rites of patriarchal society suffocate her. The successive lovers who were supposed to restore her happiness push her into an increasingly anguished and empty life. Her transgressions are a fleeting consolation, loneliness a path she will forever walk, until the bitter end.
An exceptional rewriting of Madame Bovary and adapted as a feature film by Manoel de Oliveira, Bessa-Luís’ psychological insight is astonishing, the descriptions and the protagonist’s reflections on the female condition dazzling. It is that which is expected in so many books and discovered in so few; simply a masterpiece.

Several of her novels have been filmed by the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira: Abraham’s Valley (“Vale Abraão”), The Lands of Risk (“As terras do risco”) as well as Fanny Owen. Agustina Bessa-Luís has also written film scripts (Party) and theatre plays. Between 1986-87 she was editor of the newspaper O Primeiro de Janeiro (Porto). From 1990 to 1993 she directed the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon. Since the 1960s she has been a member of numerous national and international academies and writers’ associations. Her works have been translated into many languages and she has been awarded important literary prizes.

Bizzio immerses us in a fascinating literary experiment with an international fashion magazine, which he turns into the raw material for a reinvention of language, and using the cut-up. We Know What Happens at Night, Snail (»Sabemos lo que pasa por las noches, caracol«) is the result of a work that defies all kinds of conventions left and right. As well as a play with words, the work is a singular reflection on the nature of language, of meaning and its capacity to evoke emotions and sensations (in this case extremely strange ones). In short, „almost everything in these pages“ invites us to enter a unique universe, made of both conscious choices and chance, where creativity and imagination – both Bizzio‘s and the reader‘s – are the exclusive protagonists.

In A Beautiful Place (“Un lugar precioso”), two novellas (about the holiday of a couple who meet an unexpected acquaintance on the beach, and the unusual small-town nature of Martian abductions) are connected by the paranoid idea that approach and invasion function as synonyms. A beautiful place designates both the familiar space of the beach house and that of a parallel, simultaneous universe accessed by crossing the crystalline membrane of a bubble. But what strategy, however complex, can be employed to cope successfully with the surprises of fate, which test us in the uncomfortable presence of a person or the disturbing familiarity with a being from another planet? In Bizzio’s irreverent literature, the phenomenal pleasure of the written sentence can be followed by a crackle of splintered nerves, and the idyll by a hell of interstellar bureaucracy.

Mirages detach themselves from reality like the mercurial vapor of distance on a road. Ethereal. It is there and yet unreachable. When we think we have mastered it, what we believe to be real folds in on itself, or unfolds like a magician’s handkerchief.
Sergio Bizzio pulls back the curtain. Everything seems to be as it is. And yet… knock on the glass and some peculiar members of the human species reach extraordinary speeds; a doll comes to life and dies, or someone has to struggle with the power to make all their wishes come true…
In Bongo Fury, Bizzio reveals the richness of his art. Time accelerates exponentially; voices become inaudible; geographies shift and bodies twist in unusual acrobatics. Each story opens up to the unknown dimension of the times we live in.

Beyond the well-known stories of Juan Díaz de Solís, Pizarro, Magellan and Columbus, there are many others that were forgotten and lost; some distorted and falsified, and others, perhaps, that never had the chance to be told. Bizzio takes advantage of the gaps in history to give free rein to his imagination in a short, intense piece about the clash of civilisations.

The Lost (“Perdidos”) is a fast-paced novella, told in the first person through the diary or logbook entries of an explorer of the new world. A surprising and dynamic read with powerful and well-constructed episodes that weave together a succession of encounters and misfortunes, adventures with the indigenous people and nature in a jungle as dangerous as it is beautiful: the Amazon. Showing the fragility, helplessness, fear and sense of humour of these men who, despite their role in history (in today’s eyes destructive and criminal), were still fathers and sons with families on the other side of the ocean to whom they hoped to return.

-What are you doing disguised like that? Aren’t you warm?
-I’m not disguised, I’m from another planet.

Three Martians (“Tres marcianos”) are three brilliant tales with protagonists who come from the countryside, the city or other planets.

A gaucho assures his courtesan that there is a flying saucer parked on the top of a mountain and that, that very night, they are invited to meet its crew.

A being that can only be visited by appointment has shaken the life of the whole village; the neighbours are unable to comprehend what happens during these encounters.

After a space journey of more than two years, a couple meets again, but the embrace becomes unsettling: the other seems to be not exactly the same person they left behind.

Three close encounters of the first kind in the best Bizzio style: captivating from the first line, visual throughout and leaving the impression – or the doubt – that they really happened.

After their wedding party, Carlos and Irina go on a honeymoon: Ten Days in Re (“Diez días en Re”). She is happy; he is still a little drunk. They take a plane, get on a barge, and after many hours travelling they arrive at the beaches of Re. The landscape is perfect. And while looking at Irina smiling from the shore, a devastating certainty falls over Carlos: he does not love her. This thought stuns him in such a way that his arm is left stiff for days and he can’t move it. Carlos wanders like a soul in pain trying to make sense of his existence and thinking about how to proceed.

From what is initially perceived as a story of a separation, something else soon arises. The story mutates and twists, and drags us through the sand of its tropical paradise into the deepest bewilderment. On the scenography of a honeymoon, Bizzio sets a series of elements that stretch the limits of reality. Page by page the story becomes a new one, becoming thick and magnetized like the jungle that surrounds the characters. Once again Bizzio unfolds his sharply delicate prose, immersing us once more, with a disturbing naturalness, in a universe full of strangeness.

At the age of twelve, Irina lost her mother in a road accident. The next day she was sent to live with her father in Huel, a tiny village in the middle of the plains. For years she had not heard from him. She could only remember him as an office worker with an orderly life. Now he was a savage who looks after his physique: he eats raw eggs for breakfast, breaking them directly into his mouth, dressed in a sack and tie.

Life in Huel is monotonous and idle, until her father’s ex-wife returns with the intention of taking their house from them. They begin to build a new one nearby, but day after day they find the foundations destroyed. From then on, the plausible begins to get strange and twisted.

In My Life in Huel (“Mi vida en Huel”) Sergio Bizzio explores with delicate precision the social, aesthetic and amorous fantasies of an out-of-the-ordinary teenager in a world where the borders of the possible become increasingly diffuse. His mastery of the construction of atmosphere keeps us floating, flying over the land of an unusual and disturbing village.

Borgestein tells the apparently everyday story of a marriage crisis. Julia is an actress who only ever thinks of her career. When her husband is attacked by one of his patients he withdraws to a house in the mountains to think about his own life and their life together. With typical absurd narrative moments and unexpected twists and turns, the author has created a jewel of current Argentine writing.

As a star author grows tired of his success, he uses a plane crash to stage his death and starts a new life in the jungle. In his latest novel The Eaten Writer (“El escritor comido”), Bizzio takes the reader on an unusual and imaginative adventure while posing elementary questions on mankind today.

Written with the quiet humour and the fresh and concise style that characterise Bizzio’s books, Aiwa tells a tender and unusual love story in a world both bizarre and ordinary. When the teenagers Aiwa and Sony meet, it is love at first sight, but they have to hide their relationship. However, there are mysterious changes going on in Aiwa’s remote village, and soon a group of scientists disturbs their quiet life. What will they find?

In Bizzio’s novel Reality (“Realidad”), an Arabic terrorist commando hijacks an Argentine television channel in order to put pressure on the government to hand over a traitor. The Afghan head of the intruders is fascinated by the dynamics of the broadcasted reality show Big Brother and decides to use it to dismantle Western values. Indeed, the candidates accept any form of humiliation in order to become famous. As the hijackers are finally overwhelmed by the police, the fictional existence of the contestants ends and they return to real life – or is it the other way round?

It Was the Sky (“Era el cielo”) tells the story of a faltering relationship. Only a few days after making up with her, a man watches his wife being raped. He remains undiscovered and the two of them never utter a word on the matter. Caught up in the resulting dynamics, the protagonist sleepwalks towards the edge of a psychological abyss, only saved by his love for his son.

Rage (“Rabia”) is a fast-paced love story revealing the lives of the lower classes with psychological empathy and a good dose of black humour. After a heated argument with his foreman, the construction worker José María ends up strangling him and flees to the palatial villa where his girlfriend Rosa works as a maid. Hiding out in one of the attics, he watches the family. Then Rosa is raped…

La pasajera (“The Passer-by”), is a 37-year-old single mother living in Montevideo. Having sensed their love was fading, she separated from the father of her children, for whom she had once given up her treasured nomadic existence. The void left behind could not be filled even by her increasingly independent children or her teaching profession.

One evening, as a torrential downpour of rain threatens to wash away the city, she is given a lift by a 25-year-old student in his car and leaves behind her bag including her diary. In this she has confided her daily thoughts and feelings, pierced by solitude and doubt, with honesty and bar any pretence. Now plagued by the question whether the student has read everything, she buys a new journal and continues her writing: About her shame of having been discovered, but also her shame of developing tender feelings for the mobility impaired student. She shuns all contact, even feigns sickness in order to avoid appearing in lessons; yet she cannot resist the emerging love.

This intimate diary is now rendered to the reader in the form of a novel: A tender, literary confession, which, owing to the author’s exceptional observational and narrative skill, finds its suspense in everyday life.

Atlántico (“Atlantic”) tells the story of the twenty-year-old music student Lucía Domenech from Uruguay. A scholarship has led her across the ocean to Barcelona. Here the pianist shuttles back and forth between the conservatoire and her tiny attic room, and at times, the market woman is the only person she exchanges a few words with all day. Having completed her exams, Lucía suddenly finds herself in the position of an illegal immigrant. Her situation is desperate until she finds work in the household of a Catalan couple. The encounter with the married Jordi Pons ignites a passion that once again leads her across the Atlantic. This is to change her life.

Andrea Blanqué calls her latest novel Fragilidad (“Fragility”). It is about a woman in her fourties. Anya drinks. Secretly, when her husband is at work and the children are in bed. In a systematic haze, she empties glass after glass of cheap red wine, trying to fill the emptiness inside her. There is no discernable reason why she should act this way; she is a successful management assistant at a large bank, has a loyal husband and charming twins. But she is unhappy with her work and finds it harder and harder to deal with the contradiction of leading a privileged life in a country as poor as Uruguay. Sometimes she dreams of being a guerrillera and killing her boss a dream that feels liberating. She suffers from her own passivity, from the fact that she doesn’t rebel against the system. She has a brief affair with a young graphic designer, but even that doesn’t offer her a way out.

When Anya helps her friend Leda to clear her mother’s home after her death, the two women come across an old guitar. The songs of their youth prompt a turning point for Anya; she finds her spiritual home in music. She publicly exposes her boss at a company party, breaks with her old life and sets out to earn a living as a singer on buses travelling across the country. Her only companion on the road is wine. Anya reflects her own life story in the light of the dramatic fate of her best friend. At the young age of three, Leda experienced the violent deportation of her pregnant mother and her father figure in the 1970s. No one would have thought that she might lead a normal life. And yet her life seems more fulfilled, and the past plays no great role in the everyday for her. Anya’s husband begs her to come home, but it is only her strong friendship with Leda that helps her to consider returning to her children.

Critique of society and social injustice in today’s Uruguay runs through the whole of the novel. The book’s greatest strength is its mature style and language. Blanqué finds expressive metaphors for her heroine’s mental state, a woman who drinks herself into oblivion without emotion. The author is not concerned with describing a breakdown but in portraying her numb, nameless emptiness.

Boal’s most important work, Theatre of the Oppressed (“O Teatro do Oprimido“), explains the basic idea of this new form of politically and socially motivated acting techniques. Above all, Boal wanted to contribute to diminishing injustice and defend Human Rights. Together with the Forum Theatre system, the Theatre of the Opressed is trying to initiate a democratic process, “using the stage to empower the disempowered”. Acting groups and initiatives worldwide work on the basis of Boal’s methods.

Jogos Para Atores e Não-Atores is a collection of Boal’s most important exercises and games, in which the participants consciously recreate and confront problems such as sexual harrassment, homophobia or racism. After a short introduction to his theory, illustrated with stories and examples of his work with different groups in Europe, Boal describes the exercises he has found most useful, dividing them into body monologues, body dialogues, techniques from Image Theatre and rehearsal techniques. These “gamesercises” can be used by both professional and amateur actors, by teachers and therapists, in political, pedagogical or social areas. Their main aim is to convert the spectator into a spect“actor”, contributing ideas and converting roles. While dealing with problematic topics, it is of great importance to Boal that acting should always be fun, leaving out any negative notions like competition, envy or rivalry.

This classic has already been translated into numerous languages and updated several times, now including over 400 exercises. The latest edition comprises Boal’s experiences with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1997 for the creation of various characters from Hamlet.

O Arco-íris do Desejo is a handbook of exercises split into a theoretical part explaining the basics of Boal’s understanding of theatre, and a practical part presenting some of his newer acting techniques. Starting again from the principle that by acting we can free ourselves from external oppressions we have internalised, Boal’s aim is to reduce inner restraints and inhibitions and to alert a consciousness for the actor’s surroundings and his own person, which might ultimately lead him to change his life. In the exercise The Rainbow of Desire, for instance, a participant is asked to improvise a conflict from his daily life, represented by five different emotions and desires to be expressed with his body. Subsequently, the other participants assume his poses, while the improvisor steps back to see how others perceive him. He then has the chance to reflect on his behaviour and his reactions to others and possibly even change his demeanour. Other exercises are: The Cops in the Head and Their Anti-bodies, The Screen Image and The Image of the Future We Are Afraid Of. O Arco-íris do Desejo is one of the standard works of therapeutic theatre worldwide.

More information on Boal’s acting methods can be found on the homepage of the International Theatre of the Opressed Organisation:

> theatreoftheoppressed.org

> institutoaugustoboal.org

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.

Amalia is a woman in her forties. She is the secretary of the CEO of Suministros Vallejo, a family business that is going through difficult times. Organised and efficient, she nevertheless lacks sympathy, a quality needed to keep inopportune visitors at bay. She is implacable. Amalia leads her life in her own way, with defined boundaries, narrow but comfortable. And predictable. She seems to be happy with this, thinking that she does not need anything else. Until one day she meets Lazaro, a maintenance technician who comes to her office to fix something. His character is the absolute opposite of hers; his spontaneity and tendency towards chaos awaken unexpected feelings in her. So much so that from then on she begins to invent things that need fixed, or even damaging them herself, with the sole purpose of having him around. Knowing that he loves to dance, she also starts to attend dance classes…

In Dance Classes for Office Workers (“Clases de baile para oficinistas”) Burgos proves again his wide range of skills and his gift for empathizing with his characters in an authentic and original way, making his readers laugh out loud and start thinking deeply about what it means to live.

Sofía and the Blockhead (“Sofía y el terco”) is the story of one last big dream. For years now, Sofía has been asking her stubborn husband to take her out of their mountain village on a trip to the sea, so many years that the two of them have grown old. And so Sofía, her best friend Mercedes and the silent David come up with a plan… A delightful novel about desires and happiness achieved late in life.

In a refreshing style, Fight Manual (“Manual de pelea”) tells the captivating story of a boy growing up in 1990s Medellín. Fourteen-year-old Santiago’s main interests are girls, his standing in the school pecking order and soccer. But while the fights in the schoolyard are still fought with fists, the brutal laws of the narcotics mafia have long since taken over in the rest of society. In an almost innocent, humorous tone, Burgos describes the end of a childhood.