Entre irmãs by Frances de Pontes Peebles

But he chose to write about the past, not the present. Passos, who had been leading a summer study abroad program in Brazil at the time and witnessed some of the protests with his students, was inspired to write about political betrayal.

It was the year of the first wave of mass demonstrations against the administration of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (in this case, against transit fare increases). The magazine was making plans for an upcoming edition about betrayal and would he like to write something? In 2013, a senior editor of Granta Brasil, the Portuguese edition of the literary journal, contacted him. Serendipity, in the form of a series of unexpected commissions, prompted Passos’ recent forays into Brazilian history. The author’s previous novels - “Nosso grão mais fino ” (2009) and “O sonâmbulo Amador ” (2012) - dealt with memory and the past, but did not directly address Brazilian historical events or figures per se. I think these experiences tend to leave very deep, perhaps, cognitive imprints, on our memories.”Ĭreating a lived experience of historical events

This is something very appealing, very inviting. “You invite the person to imagine how it could have been. 'There is a level of emotional engagement when you play with someone's imagination,” continues the novelist. “Going through someone’s experience is not knowing that experience - you have to project yourself into it,” he adds. “All of these works explore something that I hope to shed light on - something human that often disappears from the horizon of how we talk about history and historical figures,” he remarks. In these new works, Passos - who is also a literary scholar and professor of Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures in the department of Spanish & Portuguese - offers readers a chance to viscerally relate to historical events and personages.

The result of his recent explorations is a flurry of well-reviewed publications in Portuguese: the short story “Marinheiro só ”* (see translation published in Manoa 30, 2018), the novels “ O Marechal de Costas ” (Alfaguara/Companhia das Letras, 2016) and “ Antologia fantástica da República brasileira ” (Cepe Editora, 2017) and the novella “ A órbita de King Kong ” (Quelônio, 2017). UCLA International Institute, FebruAward-winning Brazilian novelist José Luiz Passos, who became director of the Center for Brazilian Studies for the second time last summer, has been busy exploring the limits of fiction and history.

Entre irmãs by Frances de Pontes Peebles