I just read over a brief two day period a hypnotic novel by an author I had never encountered -João Gilberto Noll, a Brazilian who passed away last year at the age of 70 and who had produced an admirable collection of works. Atlantic Hotel was written in 1989 but it has a contemporary and haunting quality to it that equals the best of fictions. It is works like this that give me confidence that the literary form, especially in other languages, continues to push forward and explore ideas and feelings that are difficult to reproduce in other mediums. To give you a flavor of his fiction here is part of a review of the novel written by Joseph Schreiber for Numero Cinq literary blog:
Themes of loneliness and alienation run through his writing; his characters routinely face unlikely situations tinged with surreal overtones. These qualities have engendered a raft of comparisons—Camus, Kafka, and Beckett have been mentioned—while closer to home, Clarice Lispector’s influence is evident. But it is perhaps counterproductive to define him solely with respect to others. Noll stands on his own terms, as a writer who draws on his personal sense of self in relation to the uncertain nature of reality. It is a dialogue grounded in the psychological realm. His protagonists appear to be experiencing and reacting, rather than driving the narrative, and their fatalistic passivity can be unsettling for the reader who expects a main character who, rightly or wrongly, is motivated by some apparent objective.
Originally published in 1989, Atlantic Hotel, like Quiet Creature, can be read, in part, as a reflection of the shifting political climate of the times. Brazil was caught in an extended and difficult process of democratization after several decades of military rule. In Quiet Creature (published in 1991, and which I reviewed last year), the young protagonist, despite the bizarre circumstances in which he finds himself and his personal lack of concern for the events of the “outside world,” attends a rally for Lula and observes the relocation of settlers. This gives the novel an identifiable temporal context. However, with Atlantic Hotel, there is no direct reference to current political or social conditions. In this earlier title, the isolation and restlessness of the nameless narrator speaks more generally to the broad existential dislocation that is a constant element in Noll’s work. He asks: How well do any of us really know ourselves?
The novel begins, as it ends, with a mysterious death. The narrator-protagonist is an amorphous character. He arrives at a hotel in Rio de Janeiro, just as a body is being removed from the premises. He requests a room for the night, but is carrying no luggage. The receptionist seems enamoured with him from the outset and, in the course of his brief stay, they engage in a couple of abrupt and impersonal sexual encounters. He is fitful and unable to relax. An atmosphere of impending doom weighs on him. “I thought about my departure,” he says, “about how long I would last.” But despite his escalating anxiety, he seems reluctant to leave, and returns to his bed:
I kicked off my shoes. I felt I was repressing a sense of hopelessness inside myself, because I had to get going soon—so I pretended to be calm, very calm.
If I feigned madness, or maybe numbed amnesia, the world would rush to commit me.
And isn’t that the same thing as going away? But with the advantage of not having to expend any effort, such as coming and going from dumps like this one. If I went crazy, they’d have me doped all day and night, asleep as soon as my head dropped in a haze.
When he finally checks out of the hotel, he notices that he suddenly feels and looks aged beyond his forty years. He takes a taxi to the bus station and purchases a ticket to Florianópolis, choosing the destination on a whim. On the bus he becomes attracted to Susan, his beautiful American seatmate. But she is escaping her own demons and, before the trip is over, she has taken a fatal overdose of pills. Rather than calling for assistance or reporting her condition, the narrator responds with the paranoid fear that her death will somehow call attention to him. He takes refuge in a washroom and then a bookstore before slipping out of the station and disappearing into the city.
NATHAN SCOTT MCNAMARA: When and where did you first read João Gilberto Noll? When it came to translating his books, was it clear where to start?
ADAM MORRIS: My earliest retained memory of reading Noll is when I was in Rio for the summer of 2011 to work on my Portuguese and to get to know the city. I was pretty broke, so I spent a lot of time rifling around in used bookstores, called sebos in Brazilian Portuguese. Sebos aren’t like the fancy Bay Area used bookstores I’d gotten accustomed to: they’re way more hit-or-miss, so it’s very exciting when you find what you’re looking for. Often you end up leaving with a bizarre assortment of things you’d never otherwise read. But somewhere off the beaten track in Copacabana I found two weather-beaten Rocco editions of early Noll novels: Bandoleiros and O quieto animal da esquina. At a certain point that summer I gave up on my classes and spent most of my time reading on a bench at the botanical gardens, on the metro and the bus, and at the beach.
I guess now that I think about it, memories of this experience are part of why I suggested that Two Lines publish O quieto animal da esquina. The narrator starts out as an urban vagrant who drifts between sebos, the public library, and louche movie theaters. Likewise, when I first became acquainted with Noll, I was a literature student low on funds and spent most of my young adulthood hanging out for too long in inexpensive cafés, going to cheap double features and drinking in dive bars only when I could afford it. Similarities between me and the narrator pretty much end there: my own lived version of the aspiring-writer cliché is pretty tame, and nothing like the strange and violent flights of Noll’s protagonists. But his voice drew me in.
The most common comparison (for English readers) I’ve seen for Noll’s work is David Lynch, due partly to Noll’s dreamlike movement between surreal scenes. For those of us less familiar with Brazilian literature, what tradition does Noll come from? Does he have identifiable influences, Brazilian or otherwise?
Well, I’m partially to blame for the prevalence of that Lynch comparison. I’m a big Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive fan — who isn’t? I keep trying to push a George Saunders comparison to Noll, but as far as I know, nobody else has been running with that. Something about Lynch is resonating, and for good reason: eerie non sequitur and unexpected changes in emotional timbre are signatures of both Lynch and Noll. What I think they both do so well is to concatenate nightmarish aspects of the mundane world with scenes from dreams and hallucinations. Neither of them is interested in maintaining the boundary between the real on the one hand and the surreal or the imaginary on the other: those things are coeval parts of existence for the subjects of their fictions.
Your question about how Noll fits the Brazilian canon is not easy. Noll had said that he and some of his contemporaries were actually breaking with the Brazilian literary tradition. The 19th-century style of realist and historical novels lingered on for a while longer in Brazil than it did elsewhere, and after that came the regionalist period in the 30s, when depictions of the land and its diverse inhabitants were part of a literary project of reconciling diverse national experiences with a unitary national identity. Regionalism was in several respects a continuation of 19th-century literary nationalism, and is a phenomenon not limited to Brazil, but visible elsewhere in the Latin American literary tradition. Anyway, Noll rejected all of this.
Noll often identified Clarice Lispector as an important influence. And Nelson Rodrigues, whom he described as a writer attuned to the unconscious of the Brazilian middle class. But I think it’s more helpful to consider the question from a global perspective. It’s easy to forget this when living in the United States, but the minute you walk into a bookstore in another country, you realize how much more other literary cultures read in translation. Camus and Kafka were quite important influences on Noll, as they are for many writers who come after them, including Lispector. Noll admired Sartre and once described Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter as “biblical” for him. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find existentialist themes in Noll’s work, as there were in Lispector’s.
In just 140 pages, the narrator of Atlantic Hotel takes us through a remarkable number of sexual and violent encounters. Among other things, he’s present for four separate deaths and an amputation, none of which he anticipates. How does Noll keep the reader with him through so much blindsiding action?
Speaking technically, the way that Noll manages to keep the reader and the story together is by deliberately overemphasizing what Roland Barthes called the proairetic code of narration, which is made up of those events and descriptions that propel the action of the plot and are not intended to disclose any meaning. They indicate that things are in movement, or that something will happen next, or eventually, or inevitably. A convenient example is a knock on a door. Often Noll surprises or manipulates the reader by foreclosing the events that this narrative code sets up by constantly redeploying the proairetic code without the benefit of the hermeneutic code, which refers to the disclosure of withheld information that will satisfy the reader by allowing events to add up to a coherent narrative or by solving a problem or mystery the text presents. For example, the protagonist of Quiet Creature on the Corner is a squatter who lives in precarious circumstances with his mother and has just lost his factory job. Before the text can resolve or address those problems, he rapes his neighbor and is hauled off to jail. But before he has any reckoning with the law, he’s plucked from his cell by an older man and whisked away to the countryside. Noll short-circuits the way readers are conditioned to assimilate plots by privileging the proairetic code without the benefit of any hermeneutic codes that would help to solve the text’s enigma. Instead, the narrative only becomes more enigmatic.