Rubem Fonseca|Vastas Emoções E Pensamentos

VIRTUAL BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB| RUBEM FONSECA| VASTAS EMOÇÕES E PENSAMENTOS IMPERFEITOS | THE LOST MANUSCRIPT or VAST EMOTIONS AND IMPERFECT THOUGHTS |

17th SEPTEMBER 2020, 18.30-21.00

2020 the year of #aFeastofBrazilianLiteraryDelights

Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos (1988) By

RUBEM FONSECA (1925-2020)

translated as

The Lost Manuscript (1997) Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts (1998)

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2020 – A Feast of Brazilian Literary Delights Celebrating the birth centenary of CLARICE LISPECTOR (1920-1977), JOÃO CABRAL DE MELO NETO (1920-1999) and JOSÉ MAURO DE VASCONCELOS (1920-1984) #aFeastofBrazilianLiteraryDelights An enjoyable crime best seller: will you be able to put it down? Beware of a multitude of false leads!

The nameless obsessed narrator, a serial compulsive womaniser, a thief of sorts with a hyperinflated ego aiming at becoming a filmmaker, or a clever detective, who surreptitiously purloins bits and pieces from I. Babel’ s historically unreliable diary Konarmia (1926) taking the reader on an unlikely whirlwind tour of Rio, Berlin, Paris and somewhere in Minas Gerais.

The narrative is stitched with the names of films and filmmakers, a tell-tale sign that the narrator is an aspiring and/or frustrated film director, will certainly delight all film buffs!

And what does Francisco de Goya have to do with this plot?

Who is the actual owner of package of super valuable gems and what does it have to do with the search for the disappeared I. Babel’s manuscript in the times of the German Democratic Republic in the split city of Berlin of the Soviet era, which was fast approaching its demise?

A rather odd choice of narrator’s idol for a Brazilian writer! Could it be possible that the writer had an empathy with Isaac Babel (1894-1940) based on some personal experience of creating political propaganda? I. Babel worked for the Cheka as R. Fonseca worked for IPÊS.

As you begin, you will soon find out that in the realm of dreams, anything can happen as the narrator signals: the title, Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts, lifted from the 1899 piece ‘The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of’ by Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) and the 19th century psychological quests, and the 1852 Nouvelles Observations Sur Les Analogies Des Phénomènes Du Rêve Et De l’Aliénation Mentale by Alfred Maury (1817 -1892).

DETAILS OF AVAILABLE PUBLICATIONS:

ENGLISH

1997 – The Lost Manuscript translated by Clifford E. Landers (1938-), Bloomsbury Publishing plc., London. Reprinted as New edition (19 Feb. 1998) ISBN-10: 0747535108 ISBN-13: 978- 0747535102 Reprinted as 1998 Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts translated by Clifford E. Landers, Ecco Press

Publisher, New York. ISBN-10: 0880015837 ISBN-13: 978-0880015837 PORTUGUESE 2

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2020 – A Feast of Brazilian Literary Delights Celebrating the birth centenary of CLARICE LISPECTOR (1920-1977), JOÃO CABRAL DE MELO NETO (1920-1999) and JOSÉ MAURO DE VASCONCELOS (1920-1984) #aFeastofBrazilianLiteraryDelights 1988 -Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos published by Companhia das Letras and various editions. E.g. ISBN: 9789722015806 ISBN-13: 978-8571640177 ASIN: B07XQYQP7R Free download: http://lelivros.love/book/download-vastas-emocoes-e-pensamentos-imperfeitos-rubem- fonseca-em-epub-mobi-e-pdf/

SHORT HISTORY OF THE BOOK AND TRANSLATION

Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos, the fourth crime thriller by Rubem Fonseca, contains three parts: A Linfa do Labirinto, O manuscrito and O diamante Florentino (The Lymph of the Labyrinth, The Lost Manuscript and The Florentine Diamond). The first part is the longest.

The bestseller is a noir and reminds us of the narrative style by Dalton Trevisan (1925-). Our book club discussed his O Vampiro de Curitiba (1964/5) in March 2017. In fact, Rubem Fonseca was acquainted with Dalton Trevisan. Rubem Fonseca always propagated a myth that he was recluse and did not give interviews. Unlike Dalton Trevisan, Rubem Fonseca participated in various literary events abroad (including London) and was very open and enjoyed speaking to many attendees abroad, but refused to give interviews in Brazil. https://sistemas.mre.gov.br/kitweb/datafiles/Londres/en-us/file/cul-bookclub- 15-vampiro.pdf.

The title Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts, is taken from the writings of Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), who was an English physician, eugenicist, writer and populariser of some areas of progressive thinking. Similarly, to numerous 19th century researchers of psychological matters, human consciousness and dreams, H. Ellis wrote and spoke extensively on the matter. He was a populariser and published The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of in the Popular Science Monthly (Volume 54, April 1899), I highlight the original part of the text below, which is mentioned in chapter four of the first part The Lymph of the Labyrinth :

The interest of such a task is twofold. It not only reveals to us an archaic world of vast emotions and

imperfect thoughts, but by helping us to attain a clear knowledge of the ordinary dream processes, it

enables us in advance to deal with many of the extraordinary phenomena of dreaming, sometimes 3 presented to us by wonder-loving people as awesomely mysterious, if not indeed supernatural. The

careful analysis of mere ordinary dreams frequently gives us the key to these abnormal dreams. Page ©VIRTUAL BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB –EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON All rights reserved - Creator & Convenor -©Nadia Kerecuk http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xml 14-16 Cockspur Street London SW11Y 5BL

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In the same passage discussing the state of mind of his protagonist narrator, Rubem Fonseca equally refers to Alfred Maury (1817 -1892) and his 1852 Nouvelles Observations sur Les Analogies des Phénomènes du Rêve et de l’Aliénation Mentale.

One of the main thread lines of the three parts of this thriller is represented by the precious gems, with twists and turns, which in the end lead the reader to some site close to the mining company Tijucana, located by the River Jequitinhonha somewhere between the towns of Diamantina and Bocaiúva, in the state of Minas Gerais where the writer was born. However, there are further twists of odd gurus and bezoars.

Rubem Fonseca’s narrator makes references to numerous films and filmmakers, to other visual art forms such as the etching series, The Disasters of War and Los Caprichos by Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), musical compositions and literary works. The narrative includes a brief commentary about the narrator’s film adaptation of the Brazilian masterpiece Os Sertões: campanha de Canudos by Euclides da Cunha (1868-1909). Our book club members have read and discussed it. (see https://sistemas.mre.gov.br/kitweb/datafiles/Londres/en-us/file/cul-bookclub-15- ossertoes.pdf )

Detailed description of pieces or parts of art have featured in world literature since time immemorial. This practice often takes on an imitative or mimetic style, an appropriation and may even originate a new work of art. Or it can parody an original to various effects. It is a type of intertextuality between art forms. Recently, yet another fashionable wave has emerged to describe evocations of other art works with the term from Greek ekphrasis (ἐκφράσις), as a rhetorical device, or rather establishing an intertextual or inter- visual/auditory link with other objects of the art canon – specific aspects regarded as crucial. All authors use this to a greater or lesser degree. Literary masters merge such references imperceptibly and readers will find the layers of those allusions as they read or re-read the text. The reader is delighted to find such allusions.

Therefore, the choice the writer makes to create a narrator-protagonist obsessed with an unknown Soviet writer of Jewish descent Isaac Babel mystified most Brazilian readers. Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (1894-1940) was born in Odessa, at the time Old Russian Empire and particularly the area of The Pale of Settlement (1791-1917) of the Imperial Russia which determined where Jewish people would be allowed to settle. His family, with the original spelling of the surname as Bobel, was one of those who came to settle there. He became famous for writing about Jewish underworld in Odessa, and, also wrote plays and was interested in filmmaking. He did some work for the Odessa Studio and for Oleksander Dovzhenko (1894-1956) for the Ukrainian National Art Film Studio created in the1920s, now The Dovzhenko Film Studios.

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I. Babel wrote and published in Russian, Yiddish and French. Maksym Gorki (1868- 1936) was I. Babel’s friend and instigated him to join the Red Army. I. Babel was ‘embedded’ as a war correspondent and propagandist as a member of Checka during the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 (14 February 1919 – 18 October 1920) between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Russia. I. Babel wrote a diary during that period which was later published as book under the title Конармия (Konarmia), a short form for Первая конная армия, that is the First Cavalry Army containing 38 narratives about the Polish Soviet War.

Various historians specialised in that period of history, including the British historian Norman Davies (1939-) CMG FBA FRHistS, have shown that Isaac Babel’s partly autobiographical and partly historical account is wrong as ‘ the stories' apparent facticity is a mere illusion’ (see, for example, “Izaak Babel’s ‘Konarmiya’ Stories and the Polish-Soviet War,” Modern Language Review 67, no. 4 (1973): 845–57). I. Babel’s Commander Semyon Budyonny at the time attributed the mistakes to Babel’s lack of knowledge and M. Gorky came to his defence. Konarmia became a Soviet propaganda tool during the Stalin rule. The book appeared in English as The Red Cavalry in the late 1920s. In Brazil, a translation was published by Civilização in 1968. The original texts in Russian are now available digitally from various sources.

With reference to lost manuscripts, I. Babel also wrote about the Soviet collective farms, which he visited as an inspector, and about the Holodomor – the appalling artificial famine. The manuscript is regarded as lost. Other writings and letters were confiscated on his arrest and were also ‘lost’. The writer was arrested by the NKVD on charges of terrorism and espionage in 1939 and perished in J. Stalin’s purges. His family would not learn about his execution in January 1940 until his rehabilitation in 1954. Even in 1987, as the changes were afoot in the former Soviet Union, authors tried to get hold of the archival materials in the hope of finding I. Babel’s lost manuscripts as well as so many other writers who perished in the Great Purges. The story goes that the staff of those secret archives communicated orally that I. Babel’s manuscripts were burned but refused to put it in writing. Rubem Fonseca may have heard about those attempts to recover manuscripts at the time. It is unclear to which manuscript the fictional narrator refers too. The vagueness with which history is included in a fictional text may create fallacies.

A first memorial for Isaac Babel in the world was inaugurated in Odessa, Ukraine, in

2011. 5

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Additionally, a whole section of Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts, dwells on some of the features of the last years of the administration of the Soviet Union. For those who have studied that period of perestroika and glasnost, some items may seem to have been extracted from foreign intelligence reports or a diplomatic source with varying degrees of bias. Critics have commented on the excessive focus on those matters tends to bore the reader.

The translation in English first appeared under the title The Lost Manuscript in 1997. It was translated by Clifford E. Landers (1938-) published by Bloomsbury Publishing plc in the UK. In the USA, in 1998 the same translation appeared under the title Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts. Presumably, the first edition disregarded the source of the title and aimed at whipping up interest and profit by adopting the heading of the second part of the thriller, The Lost Manuscript, as its title.

Covers - Bloomsbury 1997 – 1998

Clifford E. Landers, who lectured at the New Jersey City University until his retirement in 2002, translated various Brazilian writers. He translated two other novels by Rubem Fonseca Bufo & Spallanzani, and Crimes of August, and short stories such as The Taker and Other Stories and Winning the Game and Other Stories.

Clifford E. Landers was well acquainted with Rubem Fonseca and his wife and published An appreciation: Rubem Fonseca on 27th April 2020 following the death of the writer. The full text appears at www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/an- appreciation-rubem-fonseca-clifford-landers

C. E. Landers also translated works from Brazilian Portuguese by Jorge Amado, João 6

Ubaldo Ribeiro, Patrícia Melo, Jô Soares, C. Buarque, Marcos Rey, Paulo Coelho, and José de Page ©VIRTUAL BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB –EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON All rights reserved - Creator & Convenor -©Nadia Kerecuk http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xml 14-16 Cockspur Street London SW11Y 5BL

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2020 – A Feast of Brazilian Literary Delights Celebrating the birth centenary of CLARICE LISPECTOR (1920-1977), JOÃO CABRAL DE MELO NETO (1920-1999) and JOSÉ MAURO DE VASCONCELOS (1920-1984) #aFeastofBrazilianLiteraryDelights Alencar and shorter fiction by Lima Barreto, Rachel de Queiroz, Osman Lins, and Moacyr Scliar. His best seller translation to date is J. de Alencar’s Iracema: a novel published in 2000 (9 + editions). He also published a book about Literary Translation: A Practical Guide by Multilingual Matters Ltd. in 2001.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

RUBEM FONSECA (11th May1925 – 15th April 2020)

Credits: Divulgação/Zeca Fonseca

Rubem Fonseca was born in the city of Juiz de Fora, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil on 11th May 1925. At the age of eight his family moved to Rio de Janeiro. He was a policeman, lecturer, civil servant, screenwriter and writer. His parents were Portuguese who settled in Brazil. He was married to Théa Maud Komel (1928-1997) and they had three children: Maria Beatriz, José Alberto and José Henrique Fonseca (a filmmaker). Rubem Fonseca continued writing into his nineties every day.

He graduated from Legal and Social Studies, from the Law Faculty of the University of Brazil (now the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). He joined the Police Force in the São Cristovão (16th District) in Rio de Janeiro in December 1952. He was one of the best students at the Police Academy and his strong subject was psychology. He would travel for a study visit to the USA in 1953 and there he decided to take a Business Course at the New York University. He took leave from the police job to teach a course in psychology at the Fundação Getulio Vargas in 1954. He worked on the beat until 1958, when took on a desk job at the Police Force Headquarters in 1958. Later, he worked for Light in Rio de Janeiro.

Rubem Fonseca seems to have developed a keen interest in screenwriting and filmmaking from the time he joined the Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais, IPÊS – The Social Studies Research Institute, in Rio de Janeiro in 1964. Rubem Fonseca was in charge of the IPÊS publications and he served as deputy to the Head, General Golbery do Couto e Silva (1911-1987). The General was an intellectual and two books autographed by Rubem Fonseca are in his archival collections. Approximately fourteen IPÊS films were made and

screened in cinemas and broadcast in Brazil. Some are available in digital format.

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2020 – A Feast of Brazilian Literary Delights Celebrating the birth centenary of CLARICE LISPECTOR (1920-1977), JOÃO CABRAL DE MELO NETO (1920-1999) and JOSÉ MAURO DE VASCONCELOS (1920-1984) #aFeastofBrazilianLiteraryDelights The IPÊS was launched in1961 by a group of business people to counteract the spread of communism in Brazil and was active until 1972. The largest national businesses and some three hundred smaller ones were founders of IPÊS, Augusto T. de Azevedo Antunes, associated with Caemi Mining company and Antônio Gallotti linked to Light S.A, where R. Fonseca was employed. IPÊS was awarded presidential recognition a as non-governmental body of public interest. The other similar body at the time was the Instituto Brasileiro de Ação Democrática (IBAD -The Brazilian Democratic Action Institute), created in 1958, which had the same aims as those pursued by IPÊS.

Rubem Fonseca started his writing career with short stories and gradually turned to crime novels. He was very prolific. He tended to depict the underbellies of cities permeated with much urban violence of pugnacious gangsters in urban squalor expressed in verbal extremes. He drew heavily on his experience as a policeman in a large capital city. It is said that his former colleagues appear in his writings in various guises. Macho characters display explicit sexual behaviour and the language is gritty and often borders on offensive.

His 1983 A Grande Arte (High Art) brought success to him abroad. He created a detective Mandrake in the style of most famous English language detective story masters. One could surmise that Rubem Fonseca possibly drew on I. Babel’s the Odessa gangster Benya Krik ruling the streets in ghettoes.

In 2007 the book O Romance Morreu was published. It contains chronicles and pieces he wrote on various subjects published on his website Literal Terra - http://literal.terra.com.br/rubem_fonseca . https://web.archive.org/web/20090105171741/http://literal.terra.com.br/rubem_fonse ca/

Much hagiographical material appeared following the writer’s death in April this year. He will be remembered for his wry style, noir thrillers and parodies of numerous earlier crime novelists which he set mostly in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was erudite and used his knowledge to add paradoxical or/and controversial depth to his narratives. His thrillers and crime narratives represent a continuity in the Brazilian tradition of the 19th century detective narratives (initiated by Machado de Assis and Olavo Bilac) and the rich pickings of the first half of 20th century and the mass adoption of the crime novels by writers.

Inevitably, Rubem Fonseca will be compared to the master micro-story creator in Brazil, the

author Dalton Trevisan (1925-) who was writing socio-psychological plots about characters 8

in Curitiba in the 1950s. Page ©VIRTUAL BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB –EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON All rights reserved - Creator & Convenor -©Nadia Kerecuk http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xml 14-16 Cockspur Street London SW11Y 5BL

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In October 2013, Rubem Fonseca recorded a rare YouTube message on the occasion of the launch of a library for the Metro employees named after him at, at the Antero de Quental Square Station of the Line 4 in the borough of Leblon in Rio de Janeiro.

Main works: Novels and novellas: O Caso Morel (1973), A Grande Arte (1983), Bufo & Spallanzani (1986), Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos (1988), Agosto (1990), O Selvagem da Ópera (1994), Do Meio do Mundo Prostituto Só Amores Guardei ao Meu Charuto (1997, novella), O doente Molière (2000, novella), Diário de um Fescenino (2003), Mandrake: A Bíblia e a Bengala (2005, novella), O Seminarista (2009), José (2011), Short story collections and anthologies: Os Prisioneiros (1963), A Coleira do Cão (1965), Lúcia McCartney (1967), Feliz Ano Novo (1975), O Homem de Fevereiro ou Março (1973), O Cobrador (1979), Romance Negro e Outras Histórias (1992), Contos Reunidos (1994), O Buraco na Parede (1995), Histórias de Amor (1997), Confraria dos Espadas (1998), Secreções, Excreções e Desatinos (2001), Pequenas Criaturas (2002), 64 Contos de Rubem Fonseca (2004), Ela e Outras Mulheres (2006), Axilas e Outras Histórias Indecorosas (2011), Histórias Curtas (2015) The following are available in English: High Art , translated by Ellen Watson (Harper & Row, New York, 1986), and three books translated by Clifford E. Landers Bufo & Spallanzani (Dutton, New York, 1990), The Lost Manuscript (Bloomsbury London 1997 and 1998)or Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts ( Ecco Press Publisher, New York, 1998) and The Taker and Other Stories (Open Letter, New York, 2008) and Winning the Game (2013)

References and sources: ➢ Biography in Portuguese: https://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa5217/rubem-fonseca ➢ Film adaptations: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0284707/ ➢ https://www.bn.gov.br/acontece/noticias/2020/04/ampliando-caminhos-rubem- fonseca-biblioteca-nacional

➢ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N0Pmo_wEKU

Literary Agency: Page ©VIRTUAL BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB –EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON All rights reserved - Creator & Convenor -©Nadia Kerecuk http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xml 14-16 Cockspur Street London SW11Y 5BL

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2020 – A Feast of Brazilian Literary Delights Celebrating the birth centenary of CLARICE LISPECTOR (1920-1977), JOÃO CABRAL DE MELO NETO (1920-1999) and JOSÉ MAURO DE VASCONCELOS (1920-1984) #aFeastofBrazilianLiteraryDelights ➢ http://www.agenciabalcells.com/en/authors/works/rubem-fonseca/vastas- emocoes-e-pensamentos-imperfeitos/ ➢ http://www.agenciabalcells.com/en/authors/author/rubem-fonseca/#autor- adaptaciones

Other sources:

On Isaac Babel: ➢ https://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/february15/freidin-babel-biography- 021610.html ➢ https://www.odesafilmstudio.com.ua/uk/about/persons/babel ➢ Text of the Konarmia http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/babel/index.html

On Norman Davies books and more: ➢ http://www.normandavies.com/?lang=en

HAPPY READING!

2020: #aFeastofBrazilianLiteraryDelights

Attendance is free, but booking is essential: [email protected] ©Nadia Kerecuk Creator and Convenor of the ©Virtual Brazilian Bilingual Book Club at the Embassy of Brazil in London

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