João Almino

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Publisher Says: After a quarrel, an ageing lawyer leaves his wife and travels from Brasília to the dry, lawless backlands of Brazil’s northeastern plateau, where he grew up. He has vague plans to start a new life, to buy a ranch and farm cotton, but unresolved childhood obsessions, fantasies, traumas resurface, threatening to overwhelm his very sense of identity. Consumed with thoughts of revenge against the man who murdered his father when he was only two, he discovers that he may in fact have been the lovechild of his rich godfather―the man who ordered the hit―and may therefore be the half-brother of the girl for whom he harbored an adolescent sexual fixation.

In this masterful novel rich in local color, João Almino creates a complex, damaged narrator inexorably dragged down into the vortex of his own treacherous memories.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Bored middle-aged man obsesses over The Girl That Got Away. After divorcing the wife who has the temerity not to save him from himself, he moves home to The Provinces *eyeroll* from the city, can't find the One, discovers he's descended from a long line of serial sexual predators/abusers, and...well, that's it, really.

Even if this was about him pining for a boy from his past, I'd find this a bog-standard iteration of a story I'm not very fond of anyway.

Dalkey Archive asks for $9.95 to let you read a Kindle edition. It has the virtue of being short.… (more)

Enigmas of Spring was first published in 2015. Majnun, a young man (early 20s) lives with (and is supported by) his grandparents in the Brazilian federal capital, Brasília. He has no job and has failed university entrance exams. He greatly respects and is somewhat envious of this grandparents, who have led lives of accomplishment and action, but Majnun himself is a dreamer, and the greater part of his human interactions are anonymous, taking place online. He is obsessed with an older, married woman, Laila. Of the young women in his life, he lusts after the sexy Suzana, but wants only to be friends with the straightforward, caring Carmen. Majnun's other great obsession is Moorish Spain, an era he idolizes as one of Moslem tolerance towards Christians and Jews, though a professor he meets through his grandfather insists on clueing him in to the fact that the truth was much more complicated and nowhere as rosy as he supposes. The bottom line to all this is that Majnun is mostly living in his own head. He has intellectual promise, but stupefied by all the possible options open to him, seems incapable of spurring himself to action. Instead, he spins self-referential fantasies about the things he might do, the causes he might fight for. He is endlessly chewing away at writing a novella about the Spain of his fantasies. All of this we get in the very early stages of the story.

Almino skillfully portrays Majnun as an example of that cohort of his generation that has been pulled down--or jumped--into the whirlpool we now call social media (I don't recall Almino using that term). Causes and plans emphasized one day disintegrate and swirl out of sight to be replaced by something else the next. The possibilities seem endless, but Majnun cannot rouse himself to pursue any. In short, he is waiting for life to happen to him.

Of Majnun's time and the people he meets down that rabbit hole, the omniscient narrator tells us:

"More than what was around him, he was interested in the vast world to be discovered; the territories of absence, infinitely larger than the territory of the present, richer and more complex, a space suitable to his imagination. Perhaps for this reason he preferred strangers, whom he met on his computer. And how did these strangers behave? What did they think and say? They lived in a flexible, malleable universe, and assumed characteristics adequate to whatever their mood might be. He didn't need to feel any responsibility to them or even remember their names. . . . They were like passersby spotted from afar or someone you've only heard about. He didn't need to be moved by their dramas, attenuated as they were by a hygienic distance. If he mourned their deaths or suffered with their suffering, it was because he had compassion for humanity, rather than the people as individuals. . . . "

And:

"{He} couldn't resign himself to the world in which he lived. . . . If he could, he would make reality less dense, lighter, wiping it down, simplifying it, as in the story he intended to tell. But he had a fundamental problem: he didn't now where he was, nor where to go. . . .

In truth, he wasn't at a crossroad. At a crossroad there are possible directions and destinations. He had entered a highway with no traffic laws, where everyone was on their own, unsure of both direction and destination."

Slowly, Majnun's obsessions, and his mental state in general, spin out of control, and our understanding of events often becomes hazy as well. Are we in reality or in Majnun's head? Sometimes it's hard to tell.

The writing in this book I found quite good, and as a cautionary tale about the intellectual dangers of the age, I found it very effective. Majnun is a character that we believe, but it is often unpleasant to be in his head, and it frequently became frustrating for me to listen to his endless imaginings about the various futures that may or may not open up for him, at the same time understanding that this is Almino's point. There is a particularly unpleasant (though brief) scene about two-thirds of the way through that it is not possible to forgive Majnun for. But again, I don't think that Almino means us to. The novel is thoughtful and Almino's treatment is nuanced and deft most of the time. And because at only 194 pages, one need not stay in Majnun's reality too long, and because, perhaps paradoxically, we do come to care about where Almino is going to take him in the end, I recommend the book to anyone interested in the themes it explores.… (more)