Off The Beaten Track: The End of the Brazilian Diaspora

Our guest blogger this week is one of our favorite authors, Leighton Gage, who lives in, and writes about, Brazil. The New York Times aptly calls his crime novels “top-notch,” “entirely absorbing,” and “irresistible." His latest, A Vine in the Blood, will be launched in the United States in December.

For about 400 years, Brazil wasn’t a country you came from; it was a country you went to.

People came from everywhere.

And if they didn’t find wealth, they found an inexplicable something, an emotional link that bound them to the land.

Few who went could ever bring themselves to leave.

But then, in the 1970s, Brazil’s economy tanked.

It wasn’t quite as bad as what happened in the Weimar Republic.

Where the currency became entirely valueless.

Or as bad as what happened in the United States during the Great Depression.

Where people lined up for free bread.

Few starved.

But, at a given point, inflation surpassed 80% a month.

Think about that. Eighty percent a month.

Businesses failed. So did banks. Unemployment soared. Millions were left without a livelihood.
And many sought sustenance outside the country.
Thus began the Great Brazilian Diaspora.

For the first time in her history, Brazil began losing her citizens.

The Italian government gives a passport to anyone who can prove they had at least one Italian grandparent. Brazil accepts dual nationality, so Brazilians besieged Italian consulates, pocketed their new EEC documents, and went off to invade Europe.

Those who had Japanese parents, or grandparents, flocked to Japan.

More than a million entered the United States, most of them illegally.

But all of them, without exception, kept at least one eye focused on what was going on in Brazil.

Full assimilation into their new societies was the farthest thing from their minds.

And during all the years, all of their exiles, their sights remained set on “going home.”

To that end, they made sure their kids retained a fluency in Portuguese.

They called friends and family “at home” at least once a week.

They installed satellite receivers, so they could watch Brazilian networks on television.

When Brazil played their host country in sports, they rooted for the Brazilian teams.

When they went on holiday, they went to Brazil.

And they worked, and waited, for the wheel to come full circle.

Now it has.

In 2010, Brazil’s economic growth surpassed that of South Korea, Japan, Germany, and the United States.

The country enjoyed the fourth-highest GDP expansion in the world after China and India. Oil has been discovered off the coast, and it now appears that Brazil will be independent in terms of petroleum. Exports are booming. Agricultural production is at an all-time high. The aircraft industry, the automobile industry, the aerospace industry, and the computer industry are all booking record profits. Inflation is low, the currency strong. Foreign investment is pouring in. The banks are solid. Employment too is at an all-time high.

One-way bookings from the United States have doubled since last year.

And a number of international moving companies have been established to handle the massive amount of business.

For Brazilians, the diaspora is over.

And now, at last, they’re going home.

Off The Beaten Track: Crime Around the World

By day, Glenn Harper is the unassuming editor of Sculpture magazine, writes for numerous art magazines, journals, and books, and has edited several books about art and culture. But by night, Glenn has a dark side: he’s been reviewing international crime fiction since 2005 at internationalnoir.blogspot.com. Take a tour of the world of crime with him below or scroll through to find your favorite hot spot.

International crime novels offer much more than a portrait of crime around the world. The following novels (drawn from the last six months of my blog/reviews) are a window on the cultures of these diverse continents and countries, crime being a perfect vehicle for a portrait not of the high and mighty but the people on the streets (mean or otherwise).

Europe:

Timothy Williams in the crime fiction world was recently included in a list of the top 10 European crime writers in The Guardian (yet he's surely the least well-known name on the list). His Commissario Trotti series is perhaps the best of the distinguished crop of non-Italian crime fiction writers whose work is set in Italy, a literary generation that includes Donna Leon, Magdalen Nabb, and Michael Dibdin.

All of these writers share a jaundiced yet appreciative view of Italy: dismayed by the politics and seduced by the culture. But Williams digs deeper into the real social and historical background, from the "years of lead" and the kidnapping of Moro through a series of scandals in government and church, as well as campaigns against corruption, leading to the "mani pulite" years of the '90s, which is the background of Big Italy, the fifth and latest of the Trotti novels. In all of his books, Williams filters the big, historical events through the lens of small, local events and people, accenting the impact of social patterns on the daily life of individuals.

That all sounds dry and stuffy, which the novels are anything but. As with all of Williams’ books, Big Italy progresses mostly through the often oblique dialogue of the Commissario, his associates, and the suspects. The effect is frequently both frustrating and comical, as well as reinforcing the overall sense that what is really going on remains resolutely below the surface of events.

Big Italy has, like the other Trotti novels and most crime fiction set in Italy, a less-than-conclusive ending, without the absolute resolution of much mystery writing. But there's a note of hope at the end: hope for the future of some of the individual characters and for the goals for which they had been striving, if not confidence in the future of the country as a whole.

Asia:

The Big Mango, by Jake Needham (another émigré writer), is a confident thriller that builds up to its explosive conclusion rather than blowing people and things up from the beginning. The story is more in the line of author Eric Ambler than that of many recent thrillers, taking an ordinary guy and thrusting him, in frequently comic ways, into an unfamiliar and unfriendly situation. The writing is clear and evocative, whether in portraying San Francisco in the early chapters or Bangkok for the majority of the book, and the characters are lively and interesting. 

The story is set in the '90s (originally published in Asia in 1999, The Big Mango was reprinted in 2010 by Marshall Cavendish in Singapore; the only editions so far have been limited to Asian publishers and distributors). Eddie, a small-time lawyer and former Vietnam-era marine, starts getting threatening mail and visitors that refer to his time in Vietnam, when he worked in a squad involved in guarding the U.S. embassy in the waning days of the U.S. presence.

The maguffin is the stuff of legends, urban and otherwise: it seems the gold and currency from the Bank of Vietnam vanished during the chaos of the U.S. departure, and someone (several someones, as it turns out) thinks Eddie's former captain knows what happened to the money, and maybe Eddie does too. After a visit from the U.S. Secret Service, Eddie gets an offer from a mystery man offering him a lot of money to go to Bangkok to look for the captain and the money.

From there, Eddie becomes involved with a shady crew: his old Army buddy, a laid-back bookstore owner and Native American; an American in Bangkok who writes a column on the nightlife there; a DEA agent; and various other Americans, Thais, and Vietnamese. It's a story told from the point of view of outsiders, seduced by Thailand but not blind to the pollution, corruption, and violence of the capital city. 

The other book I've read by Needham, The Ambassador's Wife, is quite different, more of an insider's look at another Asian crossroads, Singapore (which Needham also views with a jaundiced eye). And The Ambassador's Wife is a police procedural whereas The Big Mango is more of a slowly building adventure story.

Africa:

I liked the first Jade de Jong novel, Random Violence, by Jassy Mackenzie, and the second one, Stolen Lives, is even better. The first half of the novel dragged me along relentlessly. There's a plot line that in the second half seems a bit tacked on (though it leads to a twisty and cliff-hanger-y ending). It deals with a character who could be very interesting but isn't fully developed—but overall the novel (and especially that second half) are very good indeed.

Jade has returned (in the first novel, Random Violence) to her native Johannesburg to bring her private detective business there—as well as to a) inflict some revenge and b) reestablish contact with the object of her (mostly unrequited) passion, detective David Patel of the J-burg police. Patel refers a client to Jade, thinking that it's just a woman in need of straightforward bodyguarding after her husband has disappeared, but the case becomes complicated when Jade and the client are shot at and later the husband is discovered nearly dead from extreme torture and their daughter goes missing. Then David's son, who has been living with his estranged wife, is kidnapped...

There is a parallel case developing in England, concerning brothels and human trafficking, which ties into Jade's case and links to a deadly and mysterious character at the fringes of both: an African man whom we glimpse in a pawn shop and other locales in several chapters interspersed with the English plot and Jade's case. The threads come together in an unexpected way, forcing the reader to reassess his or her opinion about the characters. And Jade herself is very interesting: we follow not only her professional exploits but also her troubled relationship with David and a discovery about herself and her heritage that she makes in connection with her current case.

The novel offers once again a dynamic glimpse of post-Apartheid South Africa in all its grime and glory, as well as thematic consideration of violence and its roots in culture (and perhaps genetics), marriage, and desire: it's among the best of the substantial crop of South African crime fiction now becoming available.

Several recent crime novels published in the U.S. by African writers north of South Africa (from Ghana and Nigeria in particular) promise more crime fiction from the continent as a whole—not to mention one of the best books I’ve read this year, City of Veils, by Zoë Ferraris, which is set in Saudi Arabia (and is a novel that could probably only have been written by an outsider).

 

Australia: 

Wyatt, the latest Garry Disher novel to arrive in the U.S., is a continuation of his Wyatt series (about a dispassionate thief) rather than his police-procedural series (better known here in the States). Wyatt recalls the noir end of Donald Westlake's oeuvre. (For those not in the know, Westlake is one of the most prodigious and well-known U.S. writers of noir fiction). And in fact, Disher offers an homage to Westlake with two names that appear in Wyatt: Stark, one of Westlake's several pseudonyms, and Parker, one of his longest-running characters. Disher's Wyatt character has similarities with Parker, a master thief for whom things are always going wrong. But in the new novel, Wyatt is confronting problems that Parker didn't have to: money that moves electronically rather than physically, new security systems, and the constantly rising surveillance of our world today.

The characters in the Wyatt series are pretty much stock characters, interesting in their own way but reduced to their relevance to Wyatt (though the narrative does depart from the central character a good deal of the time). And Wyatt himself is always guarded, always careful, never emotional. He is a particular sort of sociopath: without empathy or even interest in his fellow humans; he's almost high-functioning autistic.

There's a telling passage in which he is attracted to the central woman character (who is one of the most interesting characters, as she veers from normal life into Wyatt's world and then into Wyatt's point of view). He feels the attraction but doesn't quite know what to do about it. Wyatt is super competent in other ways, and his inability to understand affection or to act on attraction keeps him human, in an odd way. He isn't vulnerable, but he's damaged.

The plotting is the outstanding characteristic of the Wyatt series. Through the twists and turns, Disher manages to manipulate the standard tropes of the noir-heist story in lively ways, much as Westlake did (though without the overt comedy that Westlake often employed). Disher's Wyatt (the novel and the character) are as dark as they come, but engaging and involving for the reader. Wyatt seems in some ways to be a posthumous tribute to Westlake, and is definitely both an excellent novel in its own right and the best "post-Westlake" take on that master's style that I've read.

South America:

Every Bitter Thing, Leighton Gage’s fourth “Chief Inspector Mario Silva Investigation” is his best book yet. The language is lucid, it’s informative about Brazilian life and culture (the reader even finds out how Rio de Janeiro got its name), the characters are well defined (and their interaction is natural and often comic), and the plot moves along inexorably and rapidly. It is a story that is closer to the kind of crime novel I’m most interested in as well: the first three Silva stories dealt with big issues (organ theft, human trafficking, disparities of social class and property ownership) and often with torture, organized crime, and extreme violence. Every Bitter Thing, on the other hand, deals with murder and revenge at a personal level, committed not by professional criminals but by more-or-less ordinary people under extreme pressure (which could also be said of the victims of the crimes). There are, I should say, some vividly mutilated corpses, though.

It’s also a police procedural in the best sense of the term: each member of Silva’s team is a three-dimensional character, and each has his or her separate role in the investigation. The investigation ranges across Brazil, but is focused more on Brasilia (where Silva’s federal police team is based) than the previous books as well. The nose-to-the-ground view of the investigators at work gives a quite different focus, in comparison with the first three Silva  books, which showed a lot more about the crime and the criminals: Every Bitter Thing, as a result, is far more than just a mystery or a procedural. Though a reader may figure out what’s going on before the end, the investigators are figuring it out at about the same time (and both readers and investigators will will have figured it out by the final couple of twists).

Off The Beaten Track: Notes from a Museum Nut

Leighton Gage writes a series of crime novels featuring Chief Inspector Mario Silva of the Brazilian Federal Police. The New York Times has referred to his books as “top notch… controversial and entirely absorbing” and called the new one, Every Bitter Thing, “irresistible.” Readers can access a video of him at http://www.leightongage.com, and read his weekly contributions on the blog he shares with seven other writers of international mysteries at http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/. He lives and works in Brazil.

I’m a museum nut. Maybe it has something to do with being museum-starved here in São Paulo, where we have so very few.

Although, if you ever come here, you really shouldn’t miss our MASP. It’s got the finest collection of Western Art in all of the Southern Hemisphere. And a very attractive building as well, under which a flea market is held every Sunday.

 

I have made it my goal to visit all of the great art museums of the world and I’ve been pretty successful at achieving it, but there remain two glaring exceptions in my museum knowledge.

The Hermitage...

...and the National Palace Museum in Taiwan.

I’ve never been to either place.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the former, but you may not be familiar with the latter, which has the most precious collection of Chinese Art in the world – and is one of the reasons why mainland China is so anxious to annex the country. You can read about the history of the museum here: http://www.npm.gov.tw/en/about/tradition.htm And, while there, I suggest you click on the “Collection” tab at the top of the page and sample of few of the museum’s delights. Chinese art isn’t everyone’s cup of chai, certainly not mine, but the place is still on my bucket list.

As to the Hermitage, did you know how close it is to Helsinki?

I’ve been in Finland many times, but have yet to make it to St. Petersburg, despite many promises to my wife to do so. The two cities are separated by little more than 180 miles – and there’s a train. But I’ll be in Helsinki again, in September, for the launch of another Finnish version of one of my books – and, this time, I’ve resolved to go.

The thing about museums and me is that, no matter how much I love them, if I’m in one for more than about three hours at a stretch, my level of appreciation drops. And, since I don’t see myself ever spending more than a few days in Taipei, I fear that my visit to the National Palace Museum is going to be an incomplete experience. That’s why I prefer to make extended stays in those cities that have lots to offer in the museum department.

And, being both a writer and a guy whose kids are no longer at home, my wife and I can often get away with it.

In 2009, for example, we spent the time between March and October in Paris. Enough time to see all of the museums, right?

Wrong! Paris has more than 140 of them. Some of them are so small you can do them in a morning.

One such, is the splendid little Museum of Romantic Life: http://news-e.hoosta.com/museum-of-romantic-life-in-paris/

Another is the Museum of Eroticism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Eroticism Warning: that one is “X” rated. They project classic pornographic films in black and white and have a myriad of interesting...objects. Don’t bring the kids.

The Mother of All Paris Museums is, of course, the Louvre.

If you’re living in Paris, as we were, one of the first things you should buy for yourself is a membership in the Société des Amis du Louvre: http://www.amisdulouvre.fr/index.htm

They have a little shop in one of the galleries you’ll pass on your way from the Metro to the ticket booths. Drop in, and for a mere ninety Euros, you can buy a family membership, valid for two, for a year. And, with one of those, you get to bypass the long lines at the ticket windows and visit for as long as you like, whenever you like. The normal entry fee to the Louvre is 14 Euros a person, so you and your spouse, if you have one, are going to spend 28 Euros a visit. Do the math. In four visits, the membership pays for itself. But with your membership card you can drop by for an hour or so without it seeming like an indulgence. Which is what we did, several times a week between March and October of 2009. I can honestly say that I now know the Louvre better than any other great museum in the world.

Finally, folks, a suggestion. If you haven’t yet visited Paris’s Jacquemart-André, you really should check it out: http://www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com/en/jacquemart/

They have a truly splendid collection of paintings by Italian and Flemish masters housed in what used to be a private mansion back in the Belle Époque. The art is fantastic, but the place is well worth-seeing for the building alone.