The Taker and Other Stories, published by Open Letter Books and translated by Clifford E. Landers is the first of Rubem Fonseca’s works to appear in English, though I understand he’s been quite influential in Brazil for most of his career. He was a cop—commissioner of police, in fact—before picking up a pen. I didn’t know that before reading the book, but it fascinates me now that it’s come to my attention. These stories are dark, violent, and terrifying in some ways; many of the characters are so unapologetically apathetic about their behaviour and circumstances they border on the sociopathological. That’s the sort of thing that really gives me the heebie-jeebies (that’s the medical term, right?).
“Night Drive” is the perfect opener for the book, and if The Taker is representative of Fonseca’s other work, then it’s a perfect introduction to his writing. The story is simple, semi-anonymous, and shockingly brutal. In roughly two pages, Fonseca builds a normal-seeming, domestic world, and then brings it crashing down when we learn that the narrator and family breadwinner relaxes in the evenings by running down young girls with his car. I’d heard these stories were the subject of some controversy when first published in Brazil, and given that I’ve also heard Brazil has the same kind of rural-centred soft-focus literary tradition we have here in Canada, that makes perfect sense. These stories would be controversial here as well, if they managed to get published at all. (I’m not certain they would have been.) Urban brutality doesn’t feel good, after all, and making us feel good is generally what we want our cultural myths to do for us.
For all its kick, “Night Drive” isn’t the story that really stayed with me. There’s actually two, and I’m a little bothered that they’re still with me. I quite frankly don’t understand what’s going on in them. I don’t mind saying that’s a little unusual, though not entirely unprecedented. I’ve been baffled by short stories in the past (the first time I read Dubliners comes to mind). The first story is “The Book of Panegyrics,” which appears to be about a man scamming some cash and a place to hide out by posing as a professional caregiver for a misanthropic old man who has a strange story about a book that was written in his honour, and various acts of vengance and cruelty. It could have been a straightforward piece about class conflict (The Taker has some fine examples of those), but from there it becomes exceptionally weird. The man posing as a caregiver winds up bedding the real female caregiver quickly and easily, on top of which he seems to be suffering from some kind of paranoid delusions (I write “seems” because he may not be delusional; it’s hard to tell). The man posing as a caregiver is also the narrator, and that leads to other problems figuring out what this story is about. He spends most of his time telling the story of leeching off the old man and his family, and on the old man’s story, but those things are clearly less important to him than whatever undisclosed conspiracy has him hiding out in the first place. Spending virtually no time on the issue that is clearly the most important to the narrator baffles the hell out of me.
The other piece that sticks with me is “The Eleventh of May”, which appears to be about a retirement home where the residents are slowly being murdered to ease the burden on the state. There’s a lot of the same tropes that you find in most retiree/inmate fiction (the boredom, the abuse and neglect, the paranoia), but there are clearly other things going on. I just don’t know what they are. I have a feeling I can’t explain that there are some pretty specific criticisms being leveled against the Brazilian government, about which I know essentially nothing except that there is one. That I was missing a big chunk of necessary cultural context was clear for most of these stories, but I feel like “The Eleventh of May” could be a darker, creepier One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest if I had a better grasp of Brazilian culture.
I’m reluctant to mention this next thing, because I really did enjoy the book, but I was bothered by Landers’ translation. I don’t mean its accuracy; I don’t read Portuguese, so I can’t speak to that. The one thing—perhaps the only thing—that I want out of a translation is that it function as an English document. By that I mean that the language of the translation flows easily. I’ve seen a variety techniques for shoe-horning the quirks of one language in the quirks of English, and they can all work just fine. A great example is Richard Pevar and Larissa Volokhonsky excellent work on The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. However the awkwardness that you can’t quite put your finger on, that sense that a sentence is correct without being quite right that we call “translationese” doesn’t work for me. Unfortunately, The Taker has it in spades. (It’s not terrible, not at all like Andrew Hurley’s colossal failure with Borges’ Complete Fictions.) I have a hard time putting my finger on specific instances, but whole sections of the book just didn’t feel quite right. They felt like translations. These stories are worth dealing with the translationese, though. More than worth it.
The Taker and Other Stories was published by Open Letter Books. Next up is The Pets, by Bragi Ólafsson, also published by Open Letter Books.
