Amado novels showcase a master storyteller

The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray

Translated by Gregory Rabassa

Penguin. 92 pp. $14.

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Translated by Gregory Rabassa

Penguin. 91 pp. $14.

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Reviewed by John Timpane

For the 100th anniversary of the birth of Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado (1912-2001), Penguin is bringing out two short Amado novels in new translations by Gregory Rabassa, who has brought the last two generations of English-readers the best of literature in Spanish and Portuguese.

Both The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray (1959) - English can't hold the title, which, too literally, is The Death and the Death of Quincas Scream-Because-of-Water - and The Discovery of America by the Turks (1994) are gems, Amado at the height. They sparkle, they provoke smiles and laughter, they impress with life irrepressible, with a warm yet steady storyteller's touch, sympathy and disinterest, as if Amado, surveying his people, shrugs and says, "Don't ask me."

If you've never read Amado, start here. It's second-career Amado, postwar, not the sometimes severe socialist realist of his excellent 1930s novels, such as Cacau and Jubiabá, but the comic master, he of Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1958), and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966), he who rollicked the world with tales of Brazil.

Like most of his work, these little novels are set in Bahia, where he was born. They celebrate the mixed-up stew of races, genders, origins, religions, and identities that characterizes Brazil and Brazilians.

In Quincas, a man's death (or is it?) spurs a struggle over his reputation. His shabby-genteel family insists on his probity - even on his name, Joaquim Soares da Cunha, the respectable clerk. But the street world of drunks, prosties, card-sharpers, and image vendors (!) celebrate the man they call Quincas for feats of drinking, sex, and goodness. It's totally on the side of the street: Sparrow, Bangs Blackie, Swifty, Corporal Martim, Quitéria Goggle-Eye, and the other larger-than-life street figures do the true grieving and groping and drinking. Quincas transcends all, and all aspects, even the story of his name, take on mythic overtones. He smiles throughout, cheats both his family and death. A true parable.

In Turks, we learn of the fascinating Arab-Brazilian nexus, of people from throughout the Arab world who migrated to Brazil at the turn of the 20th century and were lumped together as "Turks." A hearty cast of characters schemes, yells, drinks, and works hard as Ibrahim the widower seeks to pawn off his store, and shrew-daughter, on the best suitor.

(By the way, read both Amado's own humorous foreword of how Turks came to be written - on commission as part of an abortive celebration of the 500th anniversary of Brazil's discovery - and the ending note by his wife, the accomplished writer Zélia Gattai Amado.)

Amado is a literary giant everywhere but here. If known at all, he's known for Gabriela and for Dona Flor, that superbly bawdy, spiritual tale made into a faithful 1976 film starring Sonia Braga. (A 1982 U.S. remake, Kiss Me Goodbye, was a pale grope at the original. A new Brazilian remake is in progress.)

But Amado had an active literary life spanning nearly 70 years. His early novels are modernist Zolaesque tales of hard work in the plantations, the rise and perils of class consciousness. His work changed after World War II, when, shocked at revelations of Stalin's crimes, he left the Communist Party. His work took on a new sweetness that transcends politics talk, an amused tolerance for human foibles.

He knows pain and trouble are real, and his characters worry and suffer. But also, never far away, there's a resigned chuckle, a pleasure to greet and behold his characters in action. This ties him to writers like James Joyce, Charles Dickens, François Rabelais, and my man Geoffrey Chaucer. It can make his writing seem timeless. Thus Jean-Paul Sartre, after reading Dona Flor, called it "the best example of a folk novel." He was, as usual, wrong. It's not; it's an imaginative tale spun by a longtime poet and professor who, like many in the academy, grew up on a farm and in a village. It's an art novel told in folk terms.

There's often a milieu of people to interpret, argue, comfort, advise, and tease the main characters. Sparrow learns of his friend Quincas' death: "He couldn't bear this terrible shock all by himself. He needed the company of the other close friends, the usual gang." In Turks, what the neighbors think, what the whole town thinks, has a big role to play:

Yes, two whole weeks had passed without the old maid Adma's waiting with curses and insults for her father's arrival in the predawn hours, without the usual uproar. Some of the neighbors sensed that something was missing. Something inexplicable was happening. Adma didn't seem to be herself at all.

How funny - as if the neighbors actually miss daughter's nightly tirades at father as he returns from drink and brothel.

This bubbling sense of What Everybody Thinks, What Everybody's Saying, powers Quincas Water-Bray forward from its first heady words:

Even today a certain confusion remains regarding the death of Quincas Water-Bray. Doubts to be explained, absurd details, contradictions in the testimony of witnesses, diverse gaps. Nothing is clear as to time, place, and last words. The family, backed up by neighbors and friends, remains adamant . . . .

And off we go. All that happens is weighed in the vital, tussling court of neighborly opinion.

This human embrace, whether family or village or drinking buddies or whorehouse girlfriends, catches the fallen, absorbs the grieving, applauds the successful, upbraids the evil, scoffs at the puffed-up, bemoans the sneaky (though not without admiration and/or envy).

Why didn't this man win the Nobel Prize for Literature? He came close, but no cachaça. The Nobel committee loves local color, of course, but these books can have an edge a little too rough for cosmopolites to take. For example, Adib in The Discovery decides to take a difficult woman for his wife. His aims are mercenary: He wants her father's store, which he believes he can turn into a gold mine. With shrewdness the book presents as nothing but admirable, Adib puts his rule into action. A difficult wife requires two things: a good slap and a good something else. He gives her both whenever she acts up. His town roundly approves, and it works.

For many, that's probably too much to take; it's too much for me. It probably is what villagers in 1903 would have expected and applauded, though, and Amado, in direct free narration, appropriates the values of those for whom he speaks without necessarily celebrating them himself.

His novels' ever-present ambience of human comment and response can seem to soften the Amado universe. Sometimes I think this is why - along with the indestructible late-Amado cheerfulness - he never won the Nobel. Some self-styled austere line-toers of the late 20th century academy may have thought Amado was, in his full-heartedness, too soft, too sentimental. If any ever thought so, they were idiots. Amado triumphs, and so does his vision.