Blues for a Lost Childhood: A novel of Brazil

Antônio Torres

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It's another hot, sleepless night in Rio, punctuated by the sounds of jazz, TV, and gunshots from the cafés and shanties. In the narrator's drink-bruised mind, a nightmare begins with a parade of child coffins and a cascade of memories.

One figure stands out: Calunga, local hero, iconoclast, joker and fixer, who battles his way out of the stagnant "Backlands" of his boyhood to become a big-city journalist. Defeated by the city, his own weakness, and decades of corrupt politics and military dictatorship, only his irony remains.

Here lies all the fascinating and convulsive history of Brazil during the past thirty years and more.

Book Details

Publisher: Readers International
Publish Date: Jul 10th, 2020
Pages: 180
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 7.82in - 4.94in - 0.40in - 0.44lb
EAN: 9780930523688
Categories: • Literary• European - Spanish & Portuguese

About the Author

Torres, Antônio: - ANTÔNIO TORRES was born in 1940 in Junco (today called Sátiro Dias), a small farming village in Brazil's notoriously poor Sertão (Backlands) in the north-eastern state of Bahia. Like his characters from Bahia in The Land and Blues for a Lost Childhood, he attended school in Alagoinhas, then in Salvador. From school Antônio Torres joined the Jornal da Bahia in Salvador as a cub reporter following crime stories; then he moved to São Paulo, where he worked as a sport and local reporter for Ultima Hora. From 1965, shortly after the coup d'état that brought the military to power in Brazil (1964-1985), he moved to Portugal for 3 years to 1968, when he returned to Brazil and left journalism for advertising and fiction writing, living and working in Rio. He is now one of the best known Brazilian authors, since 2013 chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Praise for this book

"Superbly translated, Torres succeeds brilliantly in orchestrating the narrator's visions, memories, lullabies, poetry and dialogues with lost relatives into a cohesive whole." Publishers' Weekly

"One of the finest writers of contemporary Brazil." World Literature Today

"Exhilarating -- bursting with damnation, disillusionment and delirium." Cleveland Plain Dealer

"A novel that must be read, an intellectually demanding political, social and literary creation, a novel of psychological depth, remarkable imagery and tragic, absurd beauty. Torres' novel is a challenge; nonetheless it offers a wonderful opportunity to learn about a people, about a culture that knows so much more about us than we know about them." Los Angeles Times

"Torres' book mixes places and times, so that the narrator alternates between talking to the dead, quarreling with his wife, and dreaming of his mother. The style is musical and moralistic, spattered with tags of songs, proverbs..., and reminders that 'to remember is to live'.

The New Statesman

"By the time we join Calunga and his cousin in Blues for a Lost Childhood, the world has inexorably started turning. The dizziness is that of the military dictatorship and its Economic Miracle, a 'Nobel Prize afternoon' of 'traffic jams, tunnels, overpasses, sirens, barracks, tortured and torturers, and the dog-shit on the sidewalks.' The childhood language of prayer and ritual, lullabies, romantic poetry memorized at school, rural ballads reciting murder and myth, remains as both a haunting and comforting reminder of another universe, populated too by the precessions of blue 'angels'- coffins, the tragedy of infant mortality. But it is rapidly submerging beneath a new language, that of journalism and advertising, television and popular song, state propaganda and revolutionary protest, where any perspective of depth and truth has disappeared... In the limbo between these two cultures, where there is no longer any centre to hold, and where there is no possible return, then perhaps suicide, alcoholism or madness are understandable options." Babel Guide to Fiction from Portugal, Brazil & Africa in Translation

"Torres develops a syncopated, stop-start style, effervescent, raked with satire and insight into 'the outrageous things that are going on around us'.... Remarkable."

Morning Star