Contemporary Authors

• Quiet Creature on the Corner Two Lines Press (San Francisco, CA), 2016
• Atlantic Hotel Two Lines Press (San Francisco, CA), 2017

1.  Atlantic Hotel LCCN 2016955682 Type of material Book Personal name Noll, Joao Gilberto. Main title Atlantic Hotel / Joao Gilberto Noll. Published/Produced San Francisco, CA : Two Lines Press, 2017. Projected pub date 1705 Description pages cm ISBN 9781931883603 Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2.  Quiet creature on the corner LCCN 2015958652 Type of material Book Personal name Noll, Joao Gilberto. Main title Quiet creature on the corner / Joao Gilberto Noll. Published/Produced San Francisco, CA : Two Lines Press, 2016. Projected pub date 1605 Description pages cm ISBN 9781931883511 Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

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  João Gilberto Noll is the author of nearly 20 books. His work has appeared in Brazil’s leading periodicals, and he has been a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, King's College London, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. A five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, and the recipient of over 10 awards in all, he lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

• Literary Hub - http://lithub.com/investigating-the-brilliance-of-the-late-joao-gilberto-noll/

  Investigating the Brilliance of the Late João Gilberto Noll
  In Conversation About a Great Brazilian Writer
  April 6, 2017  By Literary Hub
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  When Brazilian novelist João Gilberto Noll died last week, at the age of 70, his reputation in the English-speaking world was really only beginning to blossom. The recent publication (and subsequent critical acclaim) of Quiet Creature on the Corner from Two Lines Press started the process of pushing the English-speaking world to see what the Portuguese-speaking world has long known: Noll is a master of prose, one of Brazil’s true literary icons. Next month that push will continue when Two Lines Press publishes its second Noll novel, Atlantic Hotel.
  To celebrate this Brazilian icon—whose surreal, seductive, and sordid novels have been called Lynchian and Kafkaesque—we decided to curate a roundtable of publishers, translators, and writers to discuss these idiosyncratic texts and the uncanny litterateur who wrote them. Scott Esposito, a member of Two Lines Press, publisher of Noll’s novels in English, spoke with Adam Morris, the translator of Quiet Creature on the Corner and Atlantic Hotel; Stefan Tobler, another translator of Noll’s work; and writer John Trefry.
  –Tyler Malone
  Scott Esposito: Although João Gilberto Noll had the beginnings of a reputation in the English-language world—with invitations to places like UC Berkeley and King’s College, plus a Guggenheim Fellowship, all in the 1990s and early 2000s, and of course the publication of Quiet Creature on the Corner and Atlantic—his reputation in Brazil is massive: just input his name into Twitter’s searchbox, and you’ll see page after page of people mourning his death (it goes on for some time). He also won the major Brazilian literary award, the Prêmio Jabuti, five times, a feat I’m not sure has ever been equaled. So could we start by having you all give some general thoughts on what made Noll so special?
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  John Trefry: It is really delightful that Noll was around long enough to see his work take wing and find new audiences. But it seems to me his reception would be very different in the US compared to Brazil. The political, social, and economic climates of 1980s Brazil certainly have a bearing on the hopelessness, ephemerality, and impermanence of his storytelling. I think that, as a writer, it would be fascinating to see how the essential human condition later became distilled from something so couched in a specific time and place. That essential quality is what I find most compelling about Noll.
  Adam Morris: I am not Brazilian, but I will try to speak to John’s concern about the particularity of Noll’s time and place in Brazil.
  The historical circumstances in which Noll wrote his earlier books became crucial to the dominant interpretations of his work in Latin American literary criticism. One scholar in particular, Idelber Avelar, probably has done the most to advance the understanding and study of Noll’s work. He did this mainly in a book called The Untimely Present, wherein he theorizes a category of Latin American literature he calls postdictatorial. Following Walter Benjamin’s meditations on ruin and mourning, Avelar describes the postdictatorial aesthetic as one in which the texts “confront the ruins left by the dictatorships and extract from them a strongly allegorical meaning.”
  Avelar suggests that what Noll and these other writers mourn is the lost potential that alterity, marginality, and exteriority to the dominant culture that existed under the military regimes seemed to offer while those regimes were still in place. Those who resisted the military dictatorship were able to create identities and affiliations based on their opposition, and at the same time they imagined future political projects that might replace the militarized capitalism favored by the various generals and juntas, who were backed by the CIA. When the dictatorships finally ended, political dreams of a social order based on egalitarianism, human rights, and so forth mostly failed to materialize in any concrete form, although a number of people did make gains under the now-concluded Peronist and PT eras in Argentina and Brazil. Instead, Brazil was folded into the global consumerist world order and called a rising power or a strong emerging market.
  I mention this codified academic theory because it is illuminating for readers outside of South America who would not necessarily have connected the pervasive themes of anomie and alienation in Noll’s work to that historical context. Much has been made of this postdictatorial aesthetic, but it I do think it runs the risk of overdetermining interpretations of Noll’s work, as though responding to political injustice were the central purpose of his work. It is not. And this is where his work emerges from the specificity of its circumstances of creation to achieve a more universal resonance that Anglophone readers have felt.
  Although it is true that Latin American dictatorships resorted to violent and undemocratic expressions of power, going so far as to practice broad censorship and to exile, rape, and torture their opponents, these were particularized tactics for a strategy that was advanced by other means in places like the United States and the UK: the concentration of wealth achieved through denationalized and deregulated industry, reduced barriers of entry to foreign investment capital, and the undermining of the welfare state in places where it existed. In this framework it is possible to consider Noll the peer of someone like George Saunders or Gary Lutz, who both use their fiction as commentary on the social wreckage left behind by neoliberalism in the Northern hemisphere (specifically for them, the Rust Belt), where the agenda was carried out by the slower corporate corruption of democracy instead of a dramatic campaign of domestic terror. The abjectness of Noll’s protagonists reappears in Saunders’s and Lutz’s characters, who are often endearing and pathetic or disgusting at the same time.
  Stefan Tobler: It’s great to hear Adam fill in a Brazilian and global political context for Noll’s writing. Maybe it’s worth adding that the southern city of Porto Alegre (where Noll was born, lived and died), has been in many ways the beating heart of progressive politics in Brazil: under a repeatedly-elected Workers’ Party (1989-2004) it was the place that created the World Social Forum and was, I believe, the first city in the world to introduce participatory budgeting. So perhaps it’s natural that a disillusionment with where the anti-dictatorship movement ended up was also first felt there. (And you can see the frustration and mourning in other Brazilians’ writing; it’s very much a concern in Nowhere People by Paulo Scott, who is a Porto Alegre writer of a younger generation and was a friend of Noll’s, as well as a disciple of his and his lawyer at one point.) But to echo Adam: Noll wasn’t a campaigning writer at all. He wasn’t part of any movement. He did his own thing. Although, on the other hand, nor does it seem like a coincidence that many of the best younger Brazilian writers are from Porto Alegre.
  His books are loved in Brazil because he’s a daring writer, who explored radical experience and states of mind, including mental breakdown. And not just the mind: he’s a writer of the body. Corporeal writing, to use the phrase. And if not clearly to be labeled a gay writer, certainly one who wrote about gay and homoerotic themes, and as his novels started appearing in the 1980s the transgressive, queer power of them had a magnetic pull on young readers and writers brought up largely on a diet of social realist and regionalist fiction. Although he had a reputation for being a lone wolf, he was happy to do public readings, and he didn’t shy away from causing embarrassment among more conservative audiences!
  SE: In addition to Noll being a hugely original writer, he was also a very interesting human being. One of the things we laughed about at Two Lines was how he demanded that if we ever flew him to the US for a tour it had to be on a plane that allowed him to smoke (and also first class of course). I’m not sure those planes exist any longer. But anyway, for those of you who knew what Noll was like as a person—either through first-hand experience or anecdote—could you tell us a little about who he was?
  AM: I did not know Noll personally. I have never been to Porto Alegre, where Noll lived, and as I understand it he was not in the habit of traveling all that much in recent years. Noll and I exchanged a few emails related to specific questions I had about words or phrases as I translated his work, but his replies did not stray beyond those queries. He was always prompt and helpful, and seemed to understand how difficult and unforgiving his more surreal passages could be for a translator. When I first initiated contact with him to ask permission to pitch a translation of Quiet Creature on the Corner, I was still a rather inexperienced translator, having only published one book-length work in translation from Portuguese. Naturally I was nervous about writing to someone I considered one of the best living writers in Latin America. Maybe Noll sensed this in the stiff formality of my letter; he wrote back right away to tell me how happy my letter had made him, and was full of enthusiasm for the idea.
  ST: My first contact was rather limited, but not disappointing. I had translated an excerpt from his novel Lorde (An English Gent) for Two Lines journal back in 2012 and wrote to ask his permission for publication. I got his cut-and-pasted biography and five words back: “Caro Stefan: Obrigado. Tradução brilhante!” (Dear Stefan: Thanks. Brilliant translation!) That’ll do!
  I was lucky to hear him read and meet him properly in 2014, when he and Paulo Scott both happened to be in London on reading tours and were able to do a joint event. I had some trepidation, because as publisher at And Other Stories, I’d decided at the time to focus on a newer generation of writers (publishing Scott and Rodrigo de Souza Leão) rather than publishing the very deserving Noll. But he was a true gent about it. There was a friendliness, and a tender fragility to him.
  I doubt I’ve been more transported by a reading. It was one of those rare spine-tingling readings where you know you’ve seen and heard an extraordinary thing in itself. Almost like Noll went into a trance, or incorporated something that wasn’t quite the man Noll I’d been speaking to, his voice was a slowly weaving, almost chanting line, plangent. I’ve never heard anything like it. As the brilliant (Porto Alegre) writer Michel Laub posted on twitter to mark Noll’s passing, “At the end of his life, Noll re-invented himself not in his texts (which are consistent with his texts from the 1980s), but in the way he read. His public performances change the way we remember his texts, and make his work even more original.”
  SE: One of the things that really struck us at Two Lines about Noll is the way his novels function. First of all, the attention to craft is incredibly tight. These are really just beautiful sentences (and much praise to Adam for making them just as beautiful in English translation). Beyond that, there’s the way these books function; I was corresponding with a poet who recently described it as “weird but all of a piece so it’s easy to follow along.” That’s really it: these books are so strange in what they say and how their plots move, but they flow so seamlessly that you’re just pulled through, almost in spite of how weird they are. This is one of the reasons I’m frequently comparing Noll to the films of David Lynch, which I think often achieve a similar effect. But anyway, can you share a few impressions of your first experiences with Noll’s work and how it felt to discover him?
  JT: My sense of Noll now is very different than it was a year or so ago when reading Quiet Creature on the Corner. Initially the simplicity of the writing and the predominance of narrative in that book masquerades as a conventional sort of literary fiction, of a still-reigning pat naturalism, maybe like a Coetzee. Just a clean and well-executed package. But this reading doesn’t hold up. It very quickly falls apart. Where other writers might exploit narrative to characterize human behavior and tendencies through causality, Noll strips away the flesh linking events and the moral trajectory that comes from the depiction of continuity in a narrative. He presents compartments of events whose edges are blurred in such a way that they seem to flow together—as if one is precipitated by its predecessor—but are actually discrete from one another. It is not that the sequences of events are impossible, or take advantage of the same looseness of possibility that you might assign to David Lynch, but that they betray our expectations about how causality should reflect our moral conception of human behavior. In this way I see Noll using narrative as other writers might use the texture of prose or the employment of imagery or metaphor to speak about the position of the text culturally. His narratives seem more performative than representational. That is, I look to the narrative not for what is happening, but for what it says to me about what is happening. The way that my reading has changed by adding Atlantic Hotel into the mix is that now I am certain this is the case.
  AM: The first piece of Noll’s writing that I ever read was Atlantic Hotel. It was quite unlike anything I’d ever read: dizzying in the way it condensed and distended narrative time. I was delighted by how forcefully Noll propelled the protagonist through his increasingly bizarre circumstances. There’s something presumptuous about the way he does it, maybe even a little bit rough: it gave me the feeling of being manipulated by the text.
  SE: To pick up on what Stefan said about Noll being a queer writer, I’m curious to know more about how it conditioned his reception in Brazil—that is, how widely known it was, if there was a queer writing community for Noll to be a part of, what the Brazilians thought of it, etc—and also how it may come across in his work. The two books we’ve done at Two Lines feature some very sexually aggressive narrators, but the sex they have is notably heterosexual sex. That said, I do think there is a very easy to detect undercurrent of homoeroticism in the books.
  ST: There are gay themes right from the start, though not necessarily in a central way. In the story ‘Alguma Coisa Urgentemente’ from his first (1980) collection O cego e a dançarina the protagonist gets involved in and enjoys gay prostitution, but it’s not the focus of the story. (‘Something Urgently’ can be read in Sophie Lewis’s translation in the Comma Press anthology The Book of Rio.) Later books like A céu aberto (1996), Berkeley em Bellagio (2002), Lorde (2004) and Acenos e Afagos (2008) focus much more directly on gay themes. I have to admit I don’t know off the top of my head how early Noll was seen to be part of a queer writing community. Such a community certainly existed. Apart from the many gay writers who were not out of the closet in the late 70s, there were very openly gay writers like Fernando Caio Abreu.
  JT: Full disclosure, I didn’t know this fact about Noll’s biography. It is not something that was bound into the books in any way like jacket copy or biography. So I approached the books as book-objects discrete from any kind of personal infusion of the writer. I admit that I have had reservations about the character of the sexual activities portrayed in the books. Obviously the pivotal sexual assault in Quiet Creature on the Corner is difficult to stomach, especially in light of the absence of any real penance for it. Not only does the protagonist avoid the moral consequences of his acts, but the prose avoids moral tonality regarding them. I have discussed the issue with a few women who have shared my level of discomfort and have struggled with ways of approaching the treatment of women in the texts.
  So, I feel like I am sort of coping in real-time with what the implications of Noll’s sexuality might be in relation to these concerns, or what role it might have had vis-a-vis his rendering of heterosexual men and their attitudes toward women. I certainly don’t feel like the distance someone’s sexuality might put you from your characters liberates them from scrutiny as to why they might have depicted or objectified women in a nearly purely sexual role. My reading, based on the nihilism rounding out pretty much every other aspect of the books led me to believe that these things—the depiction of women included—had critical functions in the books, rather than being gratuitous. Still, it is a very male privilege to utilize women in this way as what might amount to pawns in a morality play—and again, not as an apology, everyone seems somewhat like a pawn to the miserable machine of nature in these books. But this revelation about Noll does make me more curious about the role of his sexuality in these characterizations. Bret Easton Ellis, who later went on to fully come out, once said regarding his sexuality, “I don’t necessarily think that it’s an invalid question. The characters in my novels often have a very shifting sexuality. But if people knew that I was straight, they’d read [my books] in a different way. If they knew I was gay, Psycho would be read as a different book.” Whether or not that is an accurate assessment is hard to know. I think it may be. So in light of that, anything I might have to say, beyond the fact that, for me as a reader, this knowledge would significantly color my perspective on the above, would be purely an assumption as to what the actual process and its motivations were.
  AM: Both Noll and his critics have described him as cinematic writer, and Noll telegraphed his familiarity with cinematic clichés while subverting or bending them to his own purposes. One set of tropes by which we recognize noir film and genre fiction associates deviant sexuality with social illness or corruption. Together these tropes signify a seamy and lawless underbelly of society where people are generally the authors of their own misfortunes. By adopting some these tropes, Noll gives permission to read his portrayals of sexual deviance and gendered aggression as symptoms of a larger social dysfunction that his protagonists feel and discern, but do not necessarily articulate. They are relatively powerless actors in a system that exploits and manipulates them, and feel that there’s no recourse or way out. They react by perpetuating this exploitation to exercise some measure of control over their surroundings. In Quiet Creature, the narrator feels beholden to his protector, Kurt, and obliged to go to bed with him near the end of the novel. The mechanics of the scene are vague. But it seems to me that the narrator submits to Kurt, who is drunk and bereaved over his wife’s death. It is a strange and disturbing act of atonement and a sign of his loyalty to Kurt for rescuing him from jail, where he was sent in the first place for raping his neighbor.
  There is another scene from earlier in the novel where a hustler pretending to be a cop tries to shake down the narrator in the men’s room of a movie theater. It is a short episode, just a few sentences, but it’s clear that the male hustlers hanging out in the bathroom are marginalized people who are as accustomed to being harassed by the police as they are rolling their tricks. It’s one of those Lynch-like scenes where the atmosphere suddenly turns noir, and reminds me of one of the first mainstream gay novels published in the US, the almost comically noir City of Night by John Rechy—which features very many cinema bathrooms. In Atlantic Hotel there are clearer signals of the protagonist’s latent or repressed homosexuality: he only wants to have sex with the flapper-receptionist at his initial Rio hotel from behind; he refuses Nelson’s repeated entreaties that he join the bachelor-party festivities at the forest brothel; and he is impotent when Dr. Carlos’s daughter tries to seduce him. All these events add to the sexual undercurrent of his queer, homosocial relationship with Sebastião—one that crosses expected norms of race, class, gender, and disability.
  SE: I feel like you all have done a really nice job of giving a sense of what it’s like to read a Noll novel, as well as bringing up a few of his core concerns as a writer. So maybe we could conclude by talking about what Noll’s books are saying to us. It seems that virtually everyone who reads the two that Two Lines has published has an initial reaction of bafflement . . . I’ve often compared it to reading a good poem, where you know you have something to say about it, you just don’t know what that is yet. After that, it’s possible to begin making theories, but (at least in my experience) these books do defeat a lot of the critical architecture one tends to bring to a novel. So I’m curious to know what you think Noll’s novels are about…
  JT: That is very difficult. Clearly I am the resident schoolboy in short pants when it comes to all of the forces at play in the composition of these books, so my readings are purely formalistic. Building on what I said previously, I actually did not have a puzzling reaction to the texts at first, or at least not the jarring sort of puzzlement I might have upon reading something so incredibly different from the conventional novelistic form. The experience was far more insidious for me. My puzzlement came from how superficially simple the books were in their deployment of that propulsive content. They played out in the proscenium very objectively. Even when some level of introspection came into the fore it possessed a certain flatness. It was that emotionless, matter-of-factness that confused me. But that is also what gets snagged in the mind of the reader. It is very different from the objectivity of someone like Robbe-Grillet. It might be better described as lucidity than objectivity. It is like looking at yourself being injured with the curiosity of shock.
  As to what is taking place in these narratives, I would simplify it to ineffectual restlessness within the shell of mortality. The strangeness of time speaks to this, as does the almost road-trippy character of the books. The people in the books are trying—in vain, and they know it—to escape from some kind of fluid that is the only thing keeping them alive, whether it is a reliance on human companionship, or devotion to the geography of Brazil.
  AM: When I read Noll, I am reminded of how fragile life is, and of the ways we as humans try to cope with it. Noll’s characters move across public surfaces and through bureaucratic institutions and semi-private spaces like hospitals and hotels. They are conscious of how inconsequential they are to other people, and at the same time they struggle to assert who they are, if only to themselves. Like the other writers I mentioned who respond to neoliberal social conditioning—Lutz, Saunders, and many others—Noll is interested in what it’s like to be among that category of people who don’t matter as long as they’re not interfering with “order”: those interchangeable subjects in what art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud has called our “society of extras.”
  At the same time, Noll was a writer interested in the depth of human feeling and the ways that consumerist ideology disavows or stifles those feelings and the natural, animal instincts that allow humans to perform acts of total selflessness and make supposedly irrational decisions based on love or ethical principle. He understood that most of us are just one or two bad decisions away from being one of the lumpen social outcasts at the extreme margins of society who appear in his novels: a very thin but powerful narrative is all that separates “us” from being one of “them.” Consumerism thrives on this superficiality by offering distraction, placation, and the false assurances that comes with substituting a “productive” life for a meaningful one.
  What was so genius about Noll was the way he used a deceptively simple narrative style to identify and reproduce that superficiality. But his words are like ice over a very deep lake—or to quote one of Hilda Hilst’s definitions of God, “a surface of ice anchored to laughter.” So occasionally the mundane is suddenly exalted, and the sublime suddenly ridiculous. Like Saunders, Lutz, David Foster Wallace, and other masters of postmodern style, there is both mirth and despair in Noll’s work. It might sound like a generic thing to say, but how many writers actually achieve this?

• Center for the Art of Translation Website - https://catranslation.org/blog-post/commemorating-joao-gilberto-noll-1946-2017/

  QUOTE:
  quintessentially Brazilian voice that spoke important truths from that corner of the globe
  March 30, 2017
  Commemorating João Gilberto Noll (1946–2017)
  By CJ Evans
  A couple of days ago, on the phone with a friend, I was trying to find the right words to explain my admiration for João Gilberto Noll’s books, but I was failing.

  The closest I could come to articulating it was to say that when I’m reading his work I feel challenged, not by tricks of language or diction, but by being confronted with the immense complexity of people and society, captured in short books of simple words and beautiful imagery. When I got to the office yesterday morning, I had an email from Adam Morris, who has translated two of Noll’s books for us, saying that Noll had died the night before, at age 70, in Porto Alegre.
  João Gilberto Noll has been one of the most influential and controversial writers in Brazil since his debut collection of short stories, O cego e a dançarina, was published in 1980. His writing, though it has gone through distinctive modes through his more than eighteen books, has always been unique. His sentences have ranged from long and winding (even for Portuguese) to short and direct, but his themes have remained constant. He was concerned with the common person, the poor person, the person left to fend entirely for himself by Brazil’s volatile economy and political system.
  In Quiet Creature on the Corner, which we published last year, a jobless and entirely futureless young man growing up in the midst of Brazil’s economic collapse in the 80s drifts to the point where he loses any sense of right and wrong. The book is brutal in its imagery, but at its heart is a profound sadness about what happens to people, and what they are capable of, when there is no possible future they can envision.
  What I value most about Noll’s work is the mixing of the high and low language. One of the things that made him so controversial in Brazil is how he embraced the language and cadence of the lower class, recast into the sentences of literary art. There are critics who have maintained that his work couldn’t be literature because it’s too stripped, too base, but that reading not only overvalues overwrought language but also ignores the obvious intensity of the craft of his work throughout his books.
  Noll won the Prêmio Jabuti, the most prestigious prize in Brazil, five times. He spent a semester at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Iowa International Writing Program, and was a Guggenheim fellow. He was a very worldly author, and his books have been translated widely, but he is also a quintessentially Brazilian voice that spoke important truths from that corner of the globe. All of us at Two Lines are very sad to see that this necessary voice is now, regretfully, silent.
  One of the wonderful things about translation is how it lets an author’s words continue to resound in new languages, and even after that author has passed. So we are very proud to have been able to publish two of Noll’s books in Adam Morris’s wonderful translations, Quiet Creature on the Corner and Atlantic Hotel, which is coming out this May. Bringing these books into the U.S. and finding a new readership for Noll has been incredibly rewarding. But there are still so many more idiosyncratic and beautiful and difficult books of his to be translated. We hope that the voice of this true iconoclast continues to echo in English for many years to come.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/eerie-changes-emotional-timbre-adam-morris-translating-joao-gilberto-noll/

  Eerie Changes in Emotional Timbre: Adam Morris on Translating João Gilberto Noll
  May 20, 2017 LARB Blog Leave a comment
  By Nathan Scott McNamara
  Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll’s Atlantic Hotel is a surreal journey — by bus, foot, and wheelchair — around southern Brazil. The pages fly past in this short novel; the narrator travels from a murder scene in a hotel, to the beach, to a brothel, and through an apocalyptic storm, before waking up to the amputation of his own leg. And that’s just in the first half of this 140-page book.
  Noll died on March 29 at the age of 70, just two months before the publication of Atlantic Hotel in English. While Noll has been widely published in Brazil, this is only his second book in the United States. Translator Adam Morris and publisher Two Lines Pres, who also worked together on Nolls’s Quiet Creature on the Corner in 2016, now bring Atlantic Hotel to an American audience. The narrators in both of these novels are vagabonds who pursue each new activity without regard for the past or the future, and in both, the reader gets swept up in the narrator’s unparalleled ability to be diverted.
  Noll’s books are wild, violent, and fast-moving, qualities that Adam Morris has beautifully channeled in his English translations. On the occasion of the publication of Atlantic Hotel, I wrote to Adam Morris to ask him about his experience translating Noll’s work.
  ¤
  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.
  Do you suspect Noll had much of a plan when he sat down to write a book like Atlantic Hotel (or Quiet Creature on the Corner)? What do you know about his method?
  Noll used to say that he never had a plan for the novels when he wrote them. He had no final destination or discrete trajectory. Unlike César Aira, however, he does admit to rewriting the resulting narratives. If we take him at his word, Noll’s texts are produced in a way similar to the proceedings of psychoanalysis. He has stated as much in interviews.
  What’s the hardest part about translating Noll? What’s the most fun?
  This is a dual question. First there’s the challenging aspects of reading and talking about a certain writer’s work, and then there’s what I find to be the most difficult part of translating. With every writer I translate, these two series converge in a different way. In Noll’s work, it’s a matter of voice.
  Noll demonstrated in his early short stories that he could write elegantly and in a more refined postmodern style that makes those stories uncharacteristic of his overall corpus: it’s easy to imagine them having been written by someone else. The style of Atlantic Hotel and Quiet Creature on the Corner, however, are unmistakably his. Noll is very present in the voices of these novels’ narrators. He even used to say that his novels were all about one character who emerged from his own life experience, although they’re not autobiographical.
  In Quiet Creature the narrator is a young, aspiring poet. His voice reflects this: his run-on narration is at times slowed by clumsy or stark descriptions, and at others is punctuated by surprising and arresting poetic images. It was difficult to reproduce this. It required a lot of listening to the narrator and trying to hear his voice.
  The most fun part of translating Noll is certainly his wry and mordant humor, which sometimes appears even in the most extreme and violent scenes.
  How did you happen to start down the path of translation? When and how did you learn Portuguese, and what would you say is the difference between being able to fluently speak the language and being able to translate a writer like Noll?
  I became a translator in an almost accidental way. I learned Portuguese mainly in the classroom setting, and a few years later I was named one of the winners of a translation contest that I entered without ever expecting anything to come of it. The outcome of that experience was my translation of Hilda Hilst’s novella With My Dog-Eyes.
  I don’t think there’s a strong correlation between how well a person speaks their second or third language and how well they translate from it. What matters more is their command of the target language, in my case English. Good translators have a strongly developed sense of style acquired from years of reading, but can exercise restraint by not imposing their own style, if they are writers, onto works they translate. A highly regarded translator I know told me she heard a lot of me in my translation of Hilst. I don’t think she meant it to be disparaging, but I was disappointed by that comment. As a translator I want to go unnoticed.
  If you have the opportunity to translate more of Noll’s books, what would be the next one you would turn to and why?
  I’ve only begun to think about this. But most likely, the next book or two would likewise come from the same early-middle phase of Noll’s career, that is, the late 80s and early 90s, such as Harmada or A céu aberto. These texts would begin to flesh out for readers a more complete idea of what Noll was up to, and of what his concerns were as a writer.
  Why do you want to bring Noll’s books to an English-speaking audience? Why should people read him?
  Noll’s work hardly needs my approval: his literary reputation stands quite well on its own. In Brazil he is considered a titan of 20th-century letters because of his stunning originality. I happen to agree, but American readers can decide for themselves.

• Words without Borders - https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/remembering-joaeo-gilberto-noll-adam-morris

  QUOTE:
  Noll was widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished writers of literary prose in Brazil
  Noll didn’t write for prizes. What was so special about João Gilberto Noll was that he wrote for himself. This might seem like a simplistic criterion for heroism.
  e was a man who lived for literature. Particularly in his later years, Noll lived a solitary lifestyle that allowed him to devote as much of his time as possible to his craft.
  Remembering João Gilberto Noll
  By Adam Morris

  João Gilberto Noll. Photo by Gilberto Perin.

  Adam Morris, translator of João Gilberto Noll’s Atlantic Hotel and Quiet Creature on the Corner, remembers the Brazilian writer.  

  This week the literary world lost a hero. João Gilberto Noll died at his home in Porto Alegre on March 29, 2017, of natural causes. In Brazil, the outpouring of regret for his passing began shortly after news of his death was announced. 

  During the latter part of his career, Noll was widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished writers of literary prose in Brazil. Noll’s obituary in A Folha de São Paulo lists his literary achievements and his many prizes, including his Guggenheim and his five Jabuti Prizes—one of Brazil’s most prestigious literary awards. These need not be summarized here. Noll didn’t write for prizes. What was so special about João Gilberto Noll was that he wrote for himself. This might seem like a simplistic criterion for heroism. And what I mean by it is simple, something better expressed by his agent, Valéria Martins, who was quoted in the Folha de São Paulo: “Era um cara que vivia para a literatura.” He was a man who lived for literature. Particularly in his later years, Noll lived a solitary lifestyle that allowed him to devote as much of his time as possible to his craft.

  This is not to say that Noll cared nothing about his readers. His writing is not self-regarding or self-indulgent. On the contrary, Noll’s work demonstrates that he understood the writer’s task to be a polyphonic conversation with his contemporaries, with history, and with his chosen literary tradition. This set Noll apart in the contemporary literary industry, which he, like his literary heroes before him, preferred to ignore. In that industry, the writer’s conversational duties have been whittled down to a monologue: a performance for “the market.” Nor is any of this just another way of saying Noll was a “literary” writer. There are plenty of men and women of letters who write very well, and who are efficient and capable masters of form. But the great works of literary history are usually not authored by contemporary masters of the form, or anyone who makes a fortune from their work. By and large, the landmarks of literary history are written by those who broke the molds that their contemporaries believed would last forever. Noll is one of these writers. 

  It takes rage to smash idols. But it requires courage to do what Noll did, which was to take them down from their pedestals to play with them. It is a great risk for an artist to set his curiosity as free as a child’s, to eliminate the taboos of sophistication. Doing so invites accusations of perversion, and in the writer’s case, of poor form. Noll certainly courted this criticism. But he had something to say to readers, as well as a few words for the historical record about his moment in time. He gathered his idols around him like an audience. Noll knew his work was original and so he did it. Other considerations didn’t factor. 

  I didn’t know him personally. Although we exchanged emails, we never met. He punctually answered my questions about specific phrases, about his punctuation habits. But mostly I tried to give him what he desired: the solitude he needed to write—and to feel. Solitude, alienation, and abandonment are the prevailing themes of his writing, and he emphasized them with a unique, cinematic prose style. Noll was sometimes described as reclusive. This might be true to the extent that what he seemed to have loved most was writing, which for someone with his convictions is a solitary endeavor. But Noll’s work is far from hermetic. He concerned himself with the fate of humankind in a world that seemed to have lost its bearings, that lacked any telos beyond the protection and expansion of capital, and that had banished transcendental horizons beyond view. From this perspective, the plight of humankind looks grim and dire, and indeed it is. But this way of seeing brought Noll into close sympathy with his characters, even when they admitted to doing the most despicable things. He was both cruel and gentle with his creations, sometimes at once. As his translator, I tried to take myself there, close to the scene of the action. Translating Noll was less an effort to approximate language than a struggle to approximate his feeling. I hope I got close enough. 

  Published Mar 31, 2017   Copyright 2017 Adam Morris

• Wikipedia -

  João Gilberto Noll
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  João Gilberto Noll (April 15, 1946 – March 29, 2017)[1] was a Brazilian writer, born in Porto Alegre, in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
  His early years were spent studying at the Catholic Colégio São Pedro. In 1967 he began university coursework in literature at the UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul), but in 1969 interrupted his studies to pursue a career as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro, working for the newspapers Folha da Manhã and Última Hora. In 1970, Noll spent a year in São Paulo working as a copy editor at the publishing house Editora Nacional, but a year later moved back to Rio and resumed both his work in journalism at Última Hora—writing on literature, theater and music—and his university studies in literature, first at the Faculdade Notre Dame and then at the PUC-Rio, where he received his degree in 1979.
  Noll published his first short story as part of a 1970 Porto Alegre anthology titled Roda de Fogo, but his more formal literary debut came in 1980 when his first book of short stories O cego e a dançarina (English title: The blind man and the dancer) was released, for which he received three literary prizes. One of Noll's short stories from O cego e a dançarina, "Alguma coisa urgentemente" ("Something urgent"), was the basis for the film Nunca fomos tão felizes (English title: We've Never Been So Happy) in 1983, directed by Murilo Salles and starring actor Claudio Marzo.
  Noll received early international attention as a participant in the Writer's Program at the University of Iowa in 1982, and when his work appeared in an anthology of new Brazilian writers published in Germany in 1983. After a short visit to the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, he was invited to teach Brazilian literature there in 1997. He was an invited scholar for a Rockefeller Foundation seminar in Bellagio, Italy, was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and spent a two-month writing residency at the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture & Society at King's College London in 2004. All of these experiences were to shape the subject matter of later works.
  His first collection of stories was followed by the novels A fúria do corpo (1981), Bandoleiros (1985) and Rastros do Verão (1986). Two of his subsequent and perhaps best-known works, the novels Hotel Atlântico (1989) and Harmada (1993), later came out in a 1997 English edition, translated by David Treece and published by Boulevard Books in London. Another novel, titled O quieto animal da esquina, appeared in 1991.
  From 1998 to 2001 Noll published a twice-weekly series of short stories in the major São Paulo daily Folha de S.Paulo, and in 2004 he began to publish longer stories every two weeks in the daily Correio Braziliense, published in the federal capital, Brasília.
  His most recent works include the novels A céu aberto (1996), Canoas e Marolas (1999), Berkeley em Bellagio (2002), Lorde (2004), and Acenos e afagos (2008), as well as the collections of short stories Mínimos múltiplos comuns (2003) and A máquina de ser (2006).
  Noll died on March 29, 2017 in Porto Alegre.[1]
  Awards and recognitions[edit]
  2009 São Paulo Prize for Literature shortlisting in the Best Book of the Year category of Acenos e Afagos[2]

• Culture Trip - https://theculturetrip.com/south-america/brazil/articles/why-joao-gilberto-noll-may-be-the-brazilian-literary-sensation-weve-been-waiting-for/

  QOTE:
  The themes he tackles—about power, control, violence, misogyny, identity, and toxic masculinity–are deeply applicable to our current socio-political moment. That  his prose evokes both unlikely empathy and harrowing complicity suggests that his literature can point the way to some ineffable qualities of ongoing issues on scales ranging from the personal to the national.
  Why João Gilberto Noll May Be the Brazilian Literary Sensation We've Been Waiting For

  Tobias Carroll

  Updated: 24 May 2017

  The recently deceased novelist and short story writer has only begun to be receive the due recognized he deserves.

  Almost Soccer Stars
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  This past March, the acclaimed Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll died at the age of 70.  In a roundtable discussion hosted by Literary Hub a week after his  death, translator and publisher Stefan Tobler compared him to social satirists George Saunders and Gary Lutz, observing that “[h]is books are loved in Brazil because he’s a daring writer, who explored radical experience and states of mind, including mental breakdown.” Writer and critic Scott Esposito noted that Noll, a queer writer, was “hugely original,” later noting that reading his work was like “reading a good poem” In fact, his novels were awarded several of Brazil’s awards, including the São Paulo Literary Prize and the prestigious Prêmio Jabuti on no less than five occasions.
  Despite all the accolades and a bibliography that tallies up to more than fifteen novels and dozens of short stories, only a few  of his works have been translated into English: Quiet Creature on the Corner, published in Brazil in 1991,  was released by Two Lines Press last year, which they’ve now followed up with a new translation of his 1989 novel Atlantic Hotel. (A novella, Harmada, appeared in translation in the UK in 1997, and in 2012 Tobler translated an excerpt of Noll’s 2004 novel Lorde: (An English Gent).)
  We can only hope that  more of Noll’s works  will make their way into English translation; The themes he tackles—about power, control, violence, misogyny, identity, and toxic masculinity–are deeply applicable to our current socio-political moment. That  his prose evokes both unlikely empathy and harrowing complicity suggests that his literature can point the way to some ineffable qualities of ongoing issues on scales ranging from the personal to the national.
  ***
  Tonally speaking, in Adam Morris’s sharp translations these two short novels recall (for this reader, at least) the ambiguities of Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterful The Unconsoled. As is the case in Ishiguro’s novel, the characters in both works  travel through a shifting landscape, their relationship to it (and the people residing there) changing over time, creating a sense of menace as the reader considers Noll’s  underlying logic.. In Quiet Creature on the Corner, for instance, there is little peace for the reader: the novel’s sense of time is marked by jarring shifts, sometimes within the same paragraph:
  “Then they were snoring and it was dark, the only light a single lamp that was oscillating in the drafty corridor. The window in that little hole had iron bars that left such a narrow space between them that not even an arm would fit; I took a board from under one of the beds, pushed it against the wall, got on top of it, and peered out at the night through the bars. A guard was passing hurriedly in the distance in front of me, a rooster began to crow.”
  There’s also the matter of its narrator revealing himself to be something of a sociopath: in the early pages, he rapes a woman, an act for which is is subsequently imprisoned. Soon afterwards, his relationship to time begins to break down. Several of his cohorts seem to be aging more quickly than they should, something the narrator refers to as “this strange dose of aging.” Some of the reveals are almost horror-movie-esque in their pacing: “Otávio was wearing a panicked expression. He’d transformed into a worn-out old man, a lump, larger than an avocado, had formed on the back of his head.” Either the narrator’s perception of time has become somehow impaired or the people around him are aging more quickly than he is; either way, the sensation is disconcerting for narrator and reader both.
  One can view his subsequent disorientation as a sort of narrative payback, a purgatorial loss of control that responds to the narrator’s violent and controlling action. Others have interpreted the more surreal aspects of the novel as a nod to Brazilian politics of the time. For me, Noll pulls off the feat of keeping his narrator (and the situation in which he finds himself) compelling without excusing what he’s done.
  ***
  Another kind of narrative shifting occurs in Atlantic Hotel. As the novel opens, its narrator is walking up the steps of a hotel when he catches sight of a corpse being carried out by what appear to be law enforcement personnel. “I regretted having walked into that hotel,” the narrator thinks. “But as I stood there, retreat only seemed another cowardly act I’d have to shoulder on my journey.” Already, there’s a sense of a story in progress that the reader is only now catching up with. He checks into a room and soon seduces one of the hotel’s employees. Once he leaves, he hails a cab and tells the driver to head to a clinic where he plans to seek treatment for his alcoholism.  His demeanor, confident at first, becomes  shattered—he talks about his age, of the ravages of it on his body, despite being “barely forty.”
  Again and again, over the course of the novel, the narrator’s  changes his identity: he tells one person he’s a salesman; he’s called upon to do the duties of a priest; he even identifies himself or is taken for an actor. Other paradoxes abound as well: at one point, his seduction of a woman he encounters borders on the toxically masculine; later in the novel, he has a vivid dream in which he’s a woman in a revealing dress, watching a man approach her on a beach.  
  At one point, the narrator makes an allusion to his past: “I’d spent years being dragged through the courts, facing down the sordid affairs of the justice system, too drained to believe my own innocence.” It’s one of the few glimpses the reader gets of just who this man actually might be. Given the amount of deaths that trail him, one might  posit our narrator as a killer in a state of denial; or perhaps he suffers  from a kind of severe alienation from humanity paralleled with a greater sense of alienation from life.
  In reading Atlantic Hotel or Quiet Creature as works of realism, one could consider the novel to be as a case study in detachment. In an essay published after his death, Morris aptly wrote that Noll “concerned himself with the fate of humankind in a world that seemed to have lost its bearings.” Given that Noll lived in Brazil during its period of military dictatorship, as well as the aftermath of it, one can ascribe a political context to some of his preferred themes and images. As Tobler notes in the roundtable discussion, Noll’s invocation of “gay and homoerotic themes” and the surrealism of his work can be seen as a response or a provocation to more conservative (whether aesthetic or political) readers.
  ***
  In a 2016 interview with translator and writer Katrina Dodson, Morris was asked how he had come to translate this novel. “[T]he novel selected me: the experience of shopping in a Brazilian sebo, or used bookstore, as the narrator of Quiet Creature does, can be quite hit or miss. I was looking for novels by Noll, and this was the first I managed to find.” Morris then discusses the dilemma of making work written in Portuguese available to a larger audience in translation, lamenting the fact that “[Brazilian literature] is underrepresented in [English-speaking] publisher lists most likely because Brazil was not until recently considered a very important country.”
  This was likely one factor in terms of why Noll, despite a relatively high profile in the United States (including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a stint at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a period of time teaching Brazilian literature at the University of California-Berkeley), has had a relatively small presence in English translation up until now. Another factor may just be bad luck and a desire by publishers to find younger writers. “I was lucky to hear [Noll] read and meet him properly in 2014,” Tobler recalled at the roundtable, “when he and Paulo Scott both happened to be in London on reading tours and were able to do a joint event. I had some trepidation, because as publisher at And Other Stories, I’d decided at the time to focus on a newer generation of writers (publishing Scott and Rodrigo de Souza Leão) rather than publishing the very deserving Noll.”
  The haunting sensibilities of João Gilberto Noll’s fiction point to why it’s continuing to find readers now, and why it continues to be all too relevant. This is unsettling fiction in the best way: work that forces the reader to determine where they stand, and question nearly everything that they encounter.

• Guernica - https://www.guernicamag.com/adam-morris-quiet-creature-on-the-corner/

  Interview AmericasLit World June 2, 2016
  Adam Morris: Quiet Creature on the Corner
  An Interview with João Gilberto Noll’s Translator, Adam Morris
  By Eric M. B. Becker

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  Image of 'Canoas e Marolas', João Gilberto Noll, taken by Flickr user Aline Viturino

  João Gilberto Noll is one of the most celebrated writers in contemporary Brazilian literature. Born in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1946, he has published numerous books and has been awarded the Jabuti Prize—Brazil’s highest literary honor—on five different occasions. In addition to his work as a novelist, Noll has written for the theater. Earlier this month, San Francisco-based Two Lines Press released Quiet Creature on the Corner, Noll’s 1991 novel that follows an unemployed poet in 1980s Brazil who finds himself thrown in jail after inexplicably raping his neighbor. But the poet finds his time in the slammer is mysteriously cut short when he’s abruptly taken to a new home—a countryside manor where his every need seen to. Like many a character throughout Noll’s work, the protagonist and narrator of Quiet Creature is very much subject to the impulses of his body and adrift in a world that appears empty of meaning.
  I sat down with Noll translator Adam Morris, who has also translated work by Brazilian writers such as Hilda Hilst and the nineteenth-century writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, among others. Hilst, like Noll, was tireless in her attempt to push the boundaries of form, and Morris’s translation of her novel With My Dog-Eyes (Melville House, 2014) earned the 2012 Susan Sontag Foundation Prize for Literary Translation. With the prize money, Morris did a residency at the Instituto Hilda Hilst, at the Casa do Sol, Hilst’s residence outside Campinas, São Paulo, an experience that gave him access to Hilst’s personal library and some of her close friends, who, Morris has said elsewhere, impressed upon him the immense gravity that the translation “be done right.”
  In recent years, the profile of literary translators has been rising steadily, the reasons for which might attributed to both to the work of organizations like the PEN Translation Committee in New York and the establishment of the London Book Fair Translation Centre, but also to the less quantifiable rise in readers’ interest in international fiction, evidenced by the burgeoning ranks of translation magazines and independent publishers with a focus on literature in translation. The decision by the Man Booker International Prize, starting this year, to split the award money equally between translator and author of the winning work was widely hailed as the culmination of a decades-long campaign (with too many participants to mention here) to give translators their due as co-creators and ambassadors for their authors’ work.
  Morris’s own views on translation, as expressed during our discussion and in other interviews, are nuanced, at once recognizing the power of translation, particularly into English, to bring deserved recognition to writers beyond the Anglophone sphere and the equal importance of reading literature in its original language.
  Though Morris’s responses to my questions place the emphasis on Noll, when speaking to him, it’s difficult to overlook his ability as a representative for the writers he trnslates. With a learned but accessible mode of expression, it’s clear that in addition to his attention to his writers’ artistry, he is ever attuned—as a good translator must be—the social and political milieu in which each work sits.
  In addition to Quiet Creature, our discussion touched on Noll’s place in Latin American letters, his influences, and the remarkable relevance of the novel’s events in light of recent efforts to impeach Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.
  —Eric M. B. Becker for Guernica Magazine.
  Guernica: I’m curious about your entry point into the literature of João Gilberto Noll. When you began translating his work, what drew you to it and how was it you described this very singular writer?
  Adam Morris: I was drawn to Noll’s work long before I decided to translate it. I had already heard Noll’s name in connection with the scholarly conversation surrounding postdictatorial literary aesthetics in the Southern Cone. By the time I was learning Portuguese and studying Brazilian literature, I already had studied Spanish-American literature extensively. In terms of style, Noll is frequently mentioned as a counterpart to two other writers I have written about, César Aira and Mario Bellatin.
  I suspect these comparisons are based of the lengths of his works, which like those of Aira and Bellatin are located somewhere between the lengths that readers associate with novellas and novels. This formal gesture is part of a much larger shared project of disregarding established generic conventions of the novel. Nowhere is this truer than in Aira’s work, but it the effort appears also in Noll’s and Bellatin’s writing. All three of these writers have abandoned the modern tradition of the masterpiece novel in favor of something else. (It bears mention that Clarice Lispector had also done so in her final book length fictions, Água viva and Um sopro de vida.) In Aira’s and Bellatin’s cases, this “something else” is a novel-system linked by covert and overt connections between works. Noll on the other hand is far more interested in the affective states of his protagonists and in attempting to incite uncomfortable affective states in his readers. His works might be described as both plotless and overdetermined by plot in the sense that sequential logic and what Roland Barthes called the proairetic code are manipulated and warped. He frustrates attempts to foresee the plot or to craft stories as they are traditionally understood and written. The series of events that appear in them are as tenuously linked into a broader narrative as those of a dream: individual causes and effects still propel the action forward, but which of the text’s details or actions that becomes a cause capable of diverting the protagonist’s itinerary or fate appears aleatory—but not in the calculated, whimsical, Rube Goldberg way that Aira’s plots produce their denouements. Noll’s humor is more understated and his overall affective register is gloomier.
  When you ask about why I selected Noll or these novels [Quiet Creature on the Corner and Atlantic Hotel], I should add that I never intended to become a professional translator in the first place. It is something that happened a bit by accident—literary translation, I think, is an occupation that selects its own victims.
  My first book-length translation project was With My Dog-Eyes, a novel by Hilda Hilst. Noll was on my very short list of projects to attempt after the Hilst translation, simply because I like his work so much and feel it deserves the international attention enabled by translation. Like Aira and Bellatin, and even more than Hilst, who always considered herself a poète-maudit in the European mold, Noll is doing something that is totally alien to an American publishing and fiction environment, which in my view is desperately stale and in need of contact with writers as bizarre and restrained as Noll. I think the only persuasive comparison for Noll that I could give you in the American context is George Saunders.
  Guernica: It’s interesting that you compare Noll to Aira and Bellatin in that Brazil is often considered—politically and culturally—to be isolated from the rest of Latin America. And to a certain extent, it is and has been for some time. Brazilian journalist Elio Gaspari has revealed that the generals who presided over the country during the dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985 took pains to differentiate themselves from other right-wing dictatorships during the same period (although we know, of course, that in reality there was a significant amount of cooperation with these same dicatorships, starting with Operation Condor). Similarly, those lines are blurred on the cultural level. In what ways do you see Noll as a counterpart to these two writers?
  Adam Morris: You’re absolutely right: Brazil is to a large degree separated from the rest of Latin America and its experience of dictatorship, like its experience of monarchy and independence, is very different from that of Spanish-American countries. Nevertheless, it became fashionable in literary-criticism circles to theorize the conditions of postdictatorship in a comparative transnational framework.
  Of course Aira experienced the dictatorship in Argentina, and Bellatin the dictablanda in Mexico, and both of those countries are now governed according to the logic of neoliberal austerity, although Argentina just concluded fifteen years of resurgent Peronism. But I do not think these writers can be grouped into a discrete political or aesthetic category, certainly not one of postdictatorship. Instead, I think one of the compelling aspects of their work is that in each case the writer is working against the concept of the novel as it has developed in the preceding two centuries. Aira is a master alchemist when it comes to blending genres into his short, crystallized comedies. And as many others have suggested, he writes at a rate faster than anyone can read him—his famous fuga hacia adelante, or “flight forward.” Bellatin and Noll also both appear to have deprioritized the notion of a masterpiece novel in favor of a project or a literary corpus that transcends the artificial boundary of the book.
  Following the work of Idelber Avelar, the Brazilian critic who perhaps more than anyone else has influenced this discussion of postdictatorial literature in Latin America, I have also compared Noll to writers such as the Chilean Diamela Eltit. Like Noll, Eltit is very concerned with questions of labor and of the anonymous interchangeability of subjects in the neoliberal regimes that tended to replace the Latin American military dictatorships. These political subjects, or as Deleuze would say, these corporate “dividuals,” understand their situation of precarious life as a hardship unto itself, but also as the loss of something concrete: the meaning and purpose that used to accrue to the status of citizenship and even to the role of the worker in the populist regimes that preceded many of the dictatorships.
  The literary historical context for this, and for Noll, is important. National identity and the national imaginary were a central concern of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American literature. But after these countries moved from populist nationalism to authoritarian nationalism and finally into globalized free-trade economies, this prerogative of national identity formation and maintenance fell away. Noll, Eltit, and many other writers responded to this.
  Guernica: As you’ve suggest here, if there’s one thing that can be said of Noll, it’s that his style is distinct and that Noll is always seeking to expand what the novel can accomplish. And yet, one can certainly see shades of his influences in his work. He often cites Clarice Lispector, among others. In what way does this influence reveal itself, and what is the mark of a Noll novel? One thing that catches the reader’s eye immediately is that he makes ample use of just about any sort of punctuation other than a period, and his sentences often go on for a page or so.
  Adam Morris: Some of the sentences in Quiet Creature are excruciatingly long. This partially has to do with Brazilian Portuguese, which is extraordinarily permissive of what we would consider run-on sentences in American English. But it’s also a stylistic decision on Noll’s part. When the translation of Quiet Creature was in editing, I had conversations with my editor about how to handle these sentences. One of the reasons I wanted to work with Two Lines is because they take risks and trust their translators, both of which were required for me to do a decent translation of Noll. With a word of caution, I submitted a manuscript that preserved even the most egregiously wandering sentences, which do last for entire pages. This generated some worry that the novel would be dismissed as sloppy, or the translation as messy. Now, this is a valid concern from an editorial perspective. As a translator, however, I owe more loyalty to the author than to the reader. If the author wants to shift tenses suddenly or use ungrammatical prose, then I attempt to reproduce this in my translation.
  So when the edits came back with most of the sentences cleaned up, a conversation began about how far or how hard I could really push this narrative style on an Anglophone audience. This was one of the rare instances I actually wrote Noll. Without further preamble, I asked him why the sentences in Quiet Creature are so long and meandering. He confirmed what I had already rationalized to myself: that the narration of Quiet Creature, which is performed by a poet in late adolescence, is intended to resemble the inchoate thought process of an immature, if sophisticated, mind. This did not fully satisfy editorial demands or my own preoccupations with how the first draft had turned out. So I thought more about the problem, returned to the Portuguese once again, and listened harder to the protagonist. Then, after revisiting every single comma splice in the novel, I ended up bisecting some sentences when I thought it was more idiomatically adolescent to do so.
  This brings me rather circuitously to Clarice Lispector. She was a writer tremendously, even obsessively, interested in sound. Her prose masterpiece Água viva could fairly be described as a fugue; the “voice” that narrates that book describes it as chamber music. But in addition to conversational chamber music, Lispector’s work is very much invested in Brazilian oral culture.
  Lispector had this tremendous range of tonality and timbre in her writing because she was always listening, with evident wonder, to the diversity of Brazilian voices across class, race, and gender boundaries. Noll is another of these listening writers, especially here in Quiet Creature. I think what he may have learned from Lispector is that so much of the uncanny vibration in her work derived from her deft handling of sounds.
  Guernica: Turning to considerations that aren’t strictly lieterary, one of the things that makes this novel interesting is that it was written in the early 1990’s, not long after Brazil was coming out of a twenty-year dictatorship. There are some interesting markers that, if you’re familiar with Brazilian history in the second half of the twentieth century, merit allusions in the novel. One is a rally for Lula—a metalworker from Brazil’s Northeast, a place with its own mythic presence in Brazilian literature—who went nose-to-nose with the dictatorship and reached the presidency years later in 2003; another seems to be the allusions near the novel’s opening to the military police performing nighttime raids against purported “car thieves” and “drug traffickers.” In what way is Noll, in this novel, concerned with the social issues of that time?
  Adam Morris: The marks of the novel’s chronological situation are quite clear. The end of the 1980s was not a time of great stability in Brazil. The economy and the political dictatorship had simultaneously unraveled in the 1980s, as it became obvious, even to the military, that the dictatorship was not in fact the guarantor of prosperity, which was one of the claims used to justify military rule over several decades, along with anticommunist rhetoric. The Lula rally in the novel takes place in Porto Alegre, where Lula had the strongest following the first time he ran for president in 1989. The MST or Landless Peoples Movement also appears in the novel. This was a relatively new movement at the time the novel was written, one that brought together peasants and even the urban homeless to demand that the new democratic state enact land reform. In part due to their efforts, the Brazilian constitution adopted in 1988 authorizes the state to repossess and redistribute lands that are not serving the public interest. Kurt and Gerda [on whose property the protagonist resides] live on what appears to be a dysfunctional plantation of some kind, and have been targeted by the MST.
  Guernica: These questions of land redistribution recall an episode earlier in the novel where Noll is once again attentive to questions of class, as relevant in today’s Brazil as they ever were. Early in the novel, the protagonist is leaving the Carlos Gomes porno cinema, and comments: “It was almost late afternoon when I left the theater, and I went slowly, so slowly that I suddenly found myself stopped in Acelino de Carvalho alley, a chilly backstreet too narrow for direct sunlight, pedestrian-only, constantly reeking of piss, a couple barbershops on one side, three or four side-exit doors from the Vitória cinema on the other, hearing voices inside speaking English. Right then I remembered: I’m going home, and I walked resolutely in the direction of the bus terminal.” Here the reader is presented with the protagonist’s world of the Gomes porno cinema, and the Vitória cinema not so far away, a different world, a world that belongs to an elite that watches films in English from abroad.
  It’s often said that more than racism, classism is the principal ill afflicting Brazilian society (though of course these are often two issues that intersect at various points). I wonder if we could talk a bit more about how these questions feature in the novel.
  Adam Morris: In Quiet Creature, Kurt and Gerda are identified as immigrants, but they would clearly read as wealthy white landowners to Brazilian readers. Gerda has to fly to Rio for cancer treatments and owns property or business interests in Germany. Their lifestyle, which does not even appear to be that extravagant, is alien to the protagonist poet. Amália and Otávio, servants on the manor, are portrayed as strange and pathetic people who mysteriously do the bidding of their masters and cannot seem to escape their ties to Kurt and Gerda. But maybe they are just poor people with nowhere else to go. And obviously, the MST occupiers would read to Brazilians as nonwhite.
  The protagonist’s disturbing sexual fantasy and encounter with the black woman he meets at the Lula rally also condenses many of Brazil’s racial stereotypes and tensions into one uncomfortable scene.
  Guernica: Let’s shift the focus to how these political concerns—public and personal—are especially relevant in Brazil today. Foreign news outlets have been bringing some rather wild news to readers lately around the likely removal of president Dilma Rousseff and an opposition to her that’s largely composed of traditional land-owning families, and the “bullets, beef, and bible caucus.” *
  Adam Morris: I am glad you ask this. We are witnessing a crisis of the PT mandate that began with Lula’s election in 2002. For fourteen years, the conservative forces in Brazilian society, which are significant, hoped to put an end to PT reforms by political means. But although conservative families and interests control the mainstream media in Brazil, there was no way a messaging campaign could compete with a political regime that was lifting millions of people out of poverty; elevating the country’s geopolitical importance; and making massive, highly visible, and universally discussed investments in direct social services. The PT effectively created a large middle class in Brazil, which had never really existed before. This in turn stimulated the economy, but this motor for growth could not, by definition, be sustained at the same pace over the long term. Now that oil prices have dropped and Brazil’s main trading partner, China, has entered an economic slowdown, the Brazilian national economy is in serious trouble.
  Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the PT was not immune from corruption, which tends to be endemic in places that were under colonial or neocolonial rule for generations. Dictatorships and closed economies also indirectly encourage black markets, so the legacy of a certain normalization of corruption and shady business in Brazil and in countries with similar historical experience is considerable.
  International reporting on the contemporary Brazilian corruption scandals often focus on Dilma Rousseff, the president and Lula’s chosen successor, but the charges against her are relatively minor in comparison with those faced by the politicians who are working hardest to oust her. Most of Dilma’s opponents are charged with or accused of outright graft, while Dilma herself is accused of moving money around within governmental entities. In other words, she is not accused of stealing for herself, as many of her adversaries are. This is a slow-motion political assassination that Dilma’s supporters describe as a coup. The landowning and business elite have finally given up trying to win back political control at the ballot box and are attempting to seize power by other means.
  I don’t think these developments are removed from Noll’s world, because this government came to power promising straightforward redistribution of wealth and, although it has moved rightward over the years, has largely delivered on these promises to the perceived detriment of the wealthy classes.
  Guernica: And yet what’s interesting is that today the MST—which has historically been a strong supporter of the PT and, as we’ve discussed, features in Quiet Creature—largely hasn’t made much progress. In fact, the PT, once in power, almost entirely abandoned that part of its agenda. And after four election cycles where, as you say, the Kurts and Gerdas of the world have seen some of their power eroded, the impeachment saga we’re seeing now would seem to signal they weren’t so much neutralized as lying in wait for the right opportunity to reassert their historical privilege. So while the PT has delivered on many promises, many journalists who have gone out to the street and spoken with those who most benefited under the PT find that these people, too, now, are in favor of Dilma’s removal (for a whole gamut of reasons, some related to media manipulation, though it would be unfair to suggest that’s the only cause). Where do you think the protagonist of Quiet Creature would stand today? What how would his story have changed?

  Adam Morris: If you are asking whether or not he would support Dilma, I think the answer might be more pessimistic than that question allows. He’s politically apathetic about the progressive left, as evidenced by his disinterest in the Lula rally. But this might be because he’s of an urban underclass so marginal that he doubts he’d fare differently depending on the political party in power.
  Guernica: It’s often commented on that Noll is a writer concerned more with psychological exploration of his characters than plot, something you’ve mentioned you don’t entirely agree with.

  Adam Morris: I would say that in Quiet Creature and Atlantic Hotel, the Noll novels I’ve translated and therefore know best, plot is subordinated to psychology but also directed, or perhaps diverted, by its most aleatory details. I have mentioned elsewhere that the Situationist practice of the dérive is applicable to this vagabond quality of action, which is not propelled by the protagonist’s will so much as his affect. The novels suggest that these affects are the results of a deepened alienation wrought by capitalist society in the decades subsequent to the Situationist writings. And here it’s important to remember that this is an internationalized affective experience, as it derives from modes of precarious life that are as indigenous to the Parisian banlieues as they are to the so-called developing world.
  Guernica: This question of marginalization, it seems to me, is also one of isolation in a more general sense. Noll has himself remarked that “solitude is a sentiment that permeates all my work.”
  Adam Morris: The poet protagonist in Quiet Creature is utterly alone. His father is out of the picture, his mother flees their situation as squatters, and he has no coworkers or friends. He’s been more or less abandoned. To make matters worse, his contact with women is predicated on the violence and sexual exploitation he’s observed around him and in the media, including porn. The only person to show interest in him is Kurt, and his perplexity over this is one of his principal concerns throughout the novel.
  Guernica: This abandonment would, generally speaking, tend to endear us to the protagonist, and yet he isn’t the most likeable of guys, is he? We’ve barely begun the novel and he’s already plotting to pawn his mother’s wedding ring and recounting his rape of a girl, which subsequently gets him interned in a psych ward and then mysteriously placed under the charge of a German-Brazilian couple. And throughout the novel, we see everything through the lens of his confusion.
  Adam Morris: Yes, that’s right. I don’t think Noll intends for the reader to identify with the protagonist in all circumstances. But there are other ways in which he is quite human and even endearing. He is frank about his curiosity and sexuality in ways that recall recent American autofiction by writers like Marie Calloway, whose book What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life I am reading now. Although at times he is despicable and at other times opaque, there are still moments where I personally have empathy for him, particularly considering his dire material circumstances and evident lack of future prospects. Someone recently asked me why Anglophone readers should read Noll “now.” This “why now” query is always put to translators, and usually my response is “why not?” There is no right time to read anything. But in this case, I do think that the global awareness of the problem of a massively contingent labor force that lacks a social safety net—essentially the plight of our protagonist—makes this novel, out of all of Noll’s work that I’ve read so far, particularly relevant at this historical juncture. Insecure, contingent labor creates a desperate, resentful underclass and cultivates sympathy for authoritarian regimes among the wealthy and powerful. We are seeing this in the United States: now that credit has tightened in the wake of the 2007-08 crash, workers are realizing wages have stagnated since the 1970’s, retirement is vanishing, and employment is far from secure. Large swathes of my generation and the next youngest one are adrift in the 1099 economy or flit between various underpaid part-time work, all the while getting crushed by student loans and rising rents. Cities that are succeeding economically have become affordable only to the children of the wealthy and privileged. As the poet of Quiet Creature only dimly realizes, it is very difficult to create art under these circumstances. The domain of recognized and remunerated “art” has been captured, reified, and reserved for those who enjoy fated privileges, as the protagonist suddenly does when he becomes a poet-tenant ward on Kurt’s manor.
  Guernica: So it would seem then that Noll is concerned with the role of the artist—and particularly the writer—in Brazilian society. Not simply on a personal level but as a concept he wishes to explore in his work. It’s not uncommon to hear people in Brazil, especially more leftist intellectuals, criticize what’s often referred to as the elite cultural, which is really a critique of who has access to art and the agency and/or authority to create it. Does Noll’s work engage this head-on?
  Adam Morris: This novel does, since the poet is obviously not from an elite class, but from the poor and marginalized urban enclave of a city distant from the cultural capitals of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. I think the classism of literary culture is a subtextual critique in Noll’s work, given that he is so interested in socially marginal people and circumstances. This is something he has in common with writers like Eltit and Bellatin, as well. As for the elite cultural, you are right that intellectual and literary production is mostly restricted to a minority of educated, wealthy, or well-connected individuals. But I do not consider this to be unique to Brazil. There is that wonderful scene in Ferrante’s Neapolitan series in which Elena visits the home of her grade-school teacher and sees shelf upon shelf of books that obviously are the inheritance of many generations of educated people. She understands instantly that she will never have the ease with words and ideas that she admires in the teacher’s handsome son and elegant daughter. This is one of many situations in which Elena realizes the inherent inequity perpetuated by social class. But I want to be clear that even in the United States, where economic and educational disparities are historically not as severe as those in Brazil, artistic and cultural production is dominated by the leisured and monied classes.
  *Following our interview, transcripts leaked shortly after Dilma’s suspension suggest that her opponents may have been collaborating with the military to monitor the MST, ostensibly in preparation to suppress any potentially disruptive activities they planned in response to her removal.

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Quote:
n its gratuitously sexual and violent episodes, the book often feels more like a 14-year-old's diary than the work of an eminent novelist. A short novel that still manages to feel like a waste of time.
Gilberto Noll, Joao: ATLANTIC HOTEL

(Mar. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Gilberto Noll, Joao ATLANTIC HOTEL Two Lines Press (Adult Fiction) $9.95 5, 16 ISBN: 978-1-931883-60-3
An unnamed man has surreal experiences as he journeys across Brazil.Although author Noll (Quiet Creature on the Corner, 2016, etc.) has long been a phenomenon in his native Brazil, he has still remained largely unknown in the United States. This slim novel, narrated by a nameless man as he travels through Brazil, shows why that might not be such a bad thing. The narrator is a cipher throughout, telling strange, contradictory stories about himself to everybody he meets. He tells people alternately that he's an alcoholic on his way to a treatment center, a priest, a B actor specializing in soap operas, and other such lies, all for no apparent reason. As he goes on his journey, death and sex seem to follow his every move. He encounters corpses throughout and frequently trysts with strange women he's only just met. These lurid encounters are rendered dispassionately, presented as nothing more than quotidian events in the protagonist's life. These passages, both in their too-cool-for-school alienation and needless edginess, reek of affectation and cheapen the novel by making its cryptic nature feel like just a contrived stab at the avant-garde. Indeed, while Noll and his translator Morris' prose frequently has a seductive, noirish quality, the novel is so fatally hamstrung by its inherent lack of substance or point that any stylistic grace only reinforces how fundamentally empty an exercise it is. None of the surreal events in the unnamed narrator's life ever have a significance beyond titillation and transgression, and in its gratuitously sexual and violent episodes, the book often feels more like a 14-year-old's diary than the work of an eminent novelist. A short novel that still manages to feel like a waste of time.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gilberto Noll, Joao: ATLANTIC HOTEL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485105376&it=r&asid=2e259ef6656cf7b924b4eb936bbf0e8f. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105376

QUOTE:
Readers will find his journey brief, captivating, and wonderfully opaque.
Atlantic Hotel

264.10 (Mar. 6, 2017): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Atlantic Hotel
Joao Gilberto Noll, trans. from the Portuguese by Adam Morris. Two Lines (PGW, dist.), $9.95
trade paper (104p) ISBN 978-1-931883-60-3
Stalked by death and spurred by the desire to keep moving, the narrator of Atlantic Hotel sets off on aimless and perilous trip through his native Brazil in Noll's (Quiet Creature on the Corner) engagingly nightmarish novel. Unhampered by luggage, this unnamed man begins by checking into a hotel where someone's just been murdered. After a tryst with a woman he meets in the lobby, he purchases a bus ticket at random and sets off for Florianopolis, seated next to a beautiful American with a tragic past, who gives him her ex-husband's coat. The next step on his noir-ish journey involves a brothel, two incompetent criminals, and a daring escape: "I'd have to run for it [and] get quickly to the car, which was close to the guard dogs who would bark as though possessed ..." Recognized by fellow travelers as an actor, the hero still has several personas to assume, but no way to avoid the strange reckoning that's in store for him. Constructed as a picaresque, Noll's novel is ultimately the story of a man learning to die; blithe descriptions of sex and violence share the page with memorable images, including the narrator in a borrowed soutane and found staff walking through a small Brazilian village, conscious that he appears to be a "man in constant touch with sacred spheres, who didn't see the visible world." Readers will find his journey brief, captivating, and wonderfully opaque. (May)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Atlantic Hotel." Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484973619&it=r&asid=3e09ebcdf2b9fd7895af6099f0d6f76e. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A484973619

"Gilberto Noll, Joao: ATLANTIC HOTEL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485105376&asid=2e259ef6656cf7b924b4eb936bbf0e8f. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017. "Atlantic Hotel." Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA484973619&asid=3e09ebcdf2b9fd7895af6099f0d6f76e. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.

• Cleaver
  https://www.cleavermagazine.com/atlantic-hotel-by-joao-gilberto-noll-reviewed-by-robert-sorrell/
  Word count: 1227

  QUOTE:
  The experience of reading Atlantic Hotel is a bit like flipping between a very literary, sparse short story and well-written genre fiction. The characters have a hint of the cartoonish about them.
  And like many works of mystery and noir fictions, sex and the possibility of sexual violence, haunt nearly every page of Atlantic Hotel.
  And yet, there is something light, almost effervescent, which hovers above the narrator and gives him just enough anxiety, just enough quirk, to complicate the story.
  ATLANTIC HOTEL
  by João Gilberto Noll
  translated by Adam Morris
  Two Lines Press, 138 pages
  reviewed by Robert Sorrell
  “Love. Call me Love, the Word Incarnate.”
  This is the closest that readers get to a name for the protagonist and narrator of João Gilberto Noll’s strange little book, Atlantic Hotel, recently translated into English by Adam Morris. The novel is set in Brazil in the 1980s, and over the course of the book, the unnamed narrator embarks on a beguiling and pointless quest through the country. At different points he will seem to be—or perhaps will be—an actor, a priest, an alcoholic, an invalid. Along the way, Noll will shade his experiences with touches of Don Quixote and Odysseus, hints of The Stranger and a taste of the pantomime and absurdity of Fellini’s early 1960s films (Noll’s unnamed narrator a believable stand-in for the existentially angsty characters usually played by Marcello Mastroianni).
  And yet for all the interesting things that could be said about Atlantic Hotel, this review is written in shadow. On March 29, 2017, just a little over a month before the release of the new English translation of Atlantic Hotel, João Gilberto Noll passed away in his home city of Porto Alegre. He was 70 years old. He left behind nearly twenty books and a legacy that stretches from his home country of Brazil to Germany, the United States, Italy, and the UK—all places where he held teaching positions or residencies—and into the many other countries where his work has been published in its original Portuguese and in translation.
  As the Center for the Art of Translation, where Two Lines Press is housed, noted in a brief article on his death, Noll was simultaneously an international author and one deeply steeped in his native Brazil. Many of his novels, such as Atlantic Hotel, one of his most famous, are set in Brazil, and rarely the Brazil of the upper classes, or of Copacabana Beach, rich tourists, and ex-pats. Instead, his integration of “lower class” language and characters has made some of his work controversial among critics in Brazil, but it’s also in part what has made his work so compelling.
  Atlantic Hotel is no exception. The middle aged male narrator spends the book wandering Brazil from city to city, encountering strange individuals, visiting dive bars, having sex, and overcoming a series of obstacles, like Odysseus on his way back to Ithaca. Except, as far as the reader can tell, the narrator has no Ithaca, no Penelope, and no suitors to defeat. He is a hero without a quest. And, it would seem, without much of a moral compass. Without really any kind of compass.

  João-Gilberto-Noll
  The experience of reading Atlantic Hotel is a bit like flipping between a very literary, sparse short story and well-written genre fiction. The characters have a hint of the cartoonish about them. Take this bit of narration, “Nelson spoke in enigmas. But all the words he was saying, the house, it all seemed to me like something out of an old film.” I can almost hear Bogey’s voice reading these lines in voiceover, while on screen he walks through the fog filled streets of an ambiguous city. But somehow, the campy quality, the cliché, manages to come off as smart and sleek. The narrator, I feel, is a bit too smart for his own good. He makes the lurid, bizarre world he traverses feel symbolic and satiric instead of hackneyed.
  And like many works of mystery and noir fictions, sex and the possibility of sexual violence, haunt nearly every page of Atlantic Hotel. As in a Henry Miller novel, the sex is described in explicit detail, but in a way that is not necessarily erotic. In fact it is often transactional, as in this early passage: “As soon as I had her undressed, she got down on all fours atop the dirty green carpet immediately. I kneeled behind her. My mission: to mount from outside her field of vision. No touching above the waist, just anonymous haunches seeking each other out pathetically.”
  At times, Noll’s sex scenes verge on a terrible cliché: using sex to show a character’s “depravity,” and this is one of the most disappointing aspects of Atlantic Hotel. The other is the way that Noll handles the women involved in these sexual acts. Women seem to exist in the novel, or at least in the narrator’s mind, solely for sexual purposes. And in that way, it doesn’t seem like Noll, or his narrator, have come very far from the hardboiled stories of heartless men and buxom dames with which Atlantic Hotel has a strange kinship.
  And yet, there is something light, almost effervescent, which hovers above the narrator and gives him just enough anxiety, just enough quirk, to complicate the story. The only other recurring appearance of a woman is in the narrator’s dreams, where he is often a woman. Of one such dream, he recalls, “Sitting atop some dunes … I was a woman from the twenties. But unlike the films of that era, nothing was in black and white. Almost everything was a shade of gold, but with pink splotches.” In the back of a cab, he apologizes to the driver. What for? the driver asks. “For being who I am,” he replies. The narrator’s sadness and humility make his wide-eyed, in-the-moment narration more compelling than it might be otherwise. It is the narrator’s perceived innocence—an innocence that the reader can tell is not wholly truthful—that allows the mystery in Atlantic Hotel to feel like it has some structure beneath it. Noll tells us next to nothing about the narrator’s past, but just gives us enough of a hint to convince us that he has one.
  Atlantic Hotel, at its very core, was a book that intrigued me, and that, in unexpected ways, made me care about it, even though I’m not sure I would say I liked it. It reminded me of a comment that Roger Ebert made about director Werner Herzog, “He has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.”
  And while Atlantic Hotel is far from a failure, it is the kind of book that is unique enough, bizarre enough, that the words “good” and “bad” don’t seem to apply. Reading Atlantic Hotel gave me the sense that I would be willing to follow Noll to all sorts of possibly unsuccessful places. Because even if I wouldn’t entirely enjoy the experience, he’d make it worth my time. He will be missed.

• Numéro Cinq
  http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2017/05/10/unbearable-transience-review-atlantic-hotel-joao-gilberto-noll-joseph-schreiber/
  Word count: 2098

  QUOTE:
  ultimately, Atlantic Hotel becomes an unnerving but starkly beautiful parable of alienation, isolation, and the eternal heartache of the human condition.
  Unbearable Transience of Being | Review of Atlantic Hotel by João Gilberto Noll — Joseph Schreiber
   

  While Noll incorporates many of the classic elements of the thriller, he consistently refuses to follow the familiar patterns. Every time a mystery is kindled, the typical narrative expectations dissolve. —Joseph Schreiber

  Atlantic Hotel
  João Gilberto Noll
  Translated by Adam Morris
  Two Lines Press, May 2017
  $9.95, 152 pages

  .
  J
  ust last year, an enthusiastic English language audience was introduced to the work of the eminent and enigmatic Brazilian writer, João Gilberto Noll, through the publication of Adam Morris’ sensitive translation of Quiet Creature on the Corner (Two Lines Press). On March 29th of this year, less than two months before the scheduled follow up release of Atlantic Hotel, his most highly regarded and controversial novel, Noll died at his home in Porto Alegre. He was seventy years old. While his passing was met with an outpouring of tributes and grief in his home country, to those of us who have been eagerly awaiting an opportunity to his sample more of his work, the confluence of these two events is certainly bittersweet.
  For all the acclaim he earned in his lifetime—notably Noll was awarded Brazil’s prestigious Jabuti Prize five times—he was an unassuming literary hero. In his obituary for Words Without Borders, translator Adam Morris wrote:
  What was so special about João Gilberto Noll was that he wrote for himself. This might seem like a simplistic criterion for heroism. And what I mean by it is simple, something better expressed by his agent, Valéria Martins, who was quoted in the Folha de São Paulo: “Era um cara que vivia para a literatura.” He was a man who lived for literature. Particularly in his later years, Noll lived a solitary lifestyle that allowed him to devote as much of his time as possible to his craft.
  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.
  His experience on the bus, his second encounter with a corpse in as many days, has shaken his haphazard sense of direction and he realizes that he needs “new bearings” on his journey. Through a bartender he ends up securing a ride with a couple of questionable-looking men who are said to be heading to Rio Grande do Sul, the southern-most state in Brazil. From this point on, things get stranger. Their first night on the road is spent at a brothel. Before the second day is out, a mysterious stop at an isolated farm has led to an unseen altercation, perhaps a murder, and our protagonist has to make a hasty escape before he himself prematurely becomes the next corpse on his curious odyssey.
  From there he catches a ride on a horse-drawn wagon. The young driver takes him to a village where he secures lodging for the night at the local vicarage. The next day, while his sole set of clothing is being laundered, he strolls the village streets dressed in the old frock of a former priest, enjoying the isolation and anonymity the guise affords him. When a distraught woman beseeches him to perform last rites for her dying sister, he complies, taking on the assumed role, and thus meets his third dead body in four days.
  Again he is restless and anxious to move on, so as soon as his own clothing is dry he takes to the road once more to continue his journey south. As evening approaches he reaches a small city, and feeling unwell, knocks on a door seeking assistance. The woman who answers starts screaming, identifying him as a kidnapper; the man at the second door he tries greets him with a gun. He collapses and when he comes to he finds himself hospitalized and permanently disabled. Whatever he is seeking or avoiding with his reluctant wandering, he finds this loss of control and freedom difficult to accept. His recovery will be slow and uncertain.
  Readers familiar with Quiet Creature will find that Atlantic Hotel is, on the surface, a more straightforward story. The language is precise, the imagery and circumstances less surreal—strange and at times threatening, yes, but potentially explainable. This novel is essentially a piece of noir fiction, with all of the clichés one typically associates with the genre: cadavers, a secretive hero who seduces and sheds women without a care, the requisite danger and suspense. For example, after witnessing a nasty confrontation that leaves him in no doubt that his own life is in immediate danger, our hero plans and executes a daring getaway:
  I dragged myself up the riverbank, taking hold of exposed roots to hoist myself up. The ground had the wetness of damp overgrowth that never sees any sunlight, leaves sticking to my clothes as I climbed, everything muddy, moving carefully so I wouldn’t make any noise—when I got to the top of the bank there’d be no cover, I’d have to run for it, make noise, get quickly to the car, which was close to the guard dogs who would bark as though possessed, pulling their chains to the point of breaking.
  And when I got to the top of the hill I ran fast to the car, opened the door, and rolled up the windows with the furious dogs just a few yards away. Deafened, I grabbed the key and started the car, and here came the shots from behind.
  One can argue that Noll is intentionally playing against the tropes of genre fiction or, in keeping with the cinematic quality of his writing, commercial film. Yet, while he incorporates many of the classic elements of the thriller, he consistently refuses to follow the familiar patterns. Every time a mystery is kindled, the typical narrative expectations dissolve. The protagonist responds with anxiety, paranoia, and an instinct for self-preservation, but resists the temptation to investigate or seek an understanding of the events he encounters. He is increasingly capricious, and there is a growing element of groundlessness to his behaviour. The effect is destabilizing.
  If there is a link between the body at the hotel, the suicide on the bus, the devious and deadly pursuits of his travel companions, and the circumstances that lead to his hospitalization and surgery, the narrator reveals no connections and draws no conclusions. Most critically, his own identity is an enigma. We learn nothing of his background or the reason for his exodus. He tells a taxi driver he is on his way to rehab, impersonates a priest, and tells the American woman that he is an unemployed actor. Later, on two separate occasions, others claim to recognize him from movie or television roles. He does not deny this, but holds no nostalgia for a past fame, nor does his persistent anxiety seem to arise from a fear of being directly identified or named.
  There is, however, a performative quality to the way he moves through the scenes that unfold. One has a sense that he is improvising and observing himself at the same time, immersed in an ongoing emotional and perceptual interplay with his environment. He is experiencing himself into being, if you like. This ontological process of continual conscious re-engagement with his surroundings—almost every time he awakes he must rediscover where he is—creates a sense of existence that is very much “in the moment.” He seems to require regular physical confirmation to maintain his fragile presence. He is very sensitive to temperature fluctuations, as he travels the weather is either unseasonably cold or hot. His sexual encounters are fleeting, even awkward. And, for a man who owns only one set of clothing, he demonstrates a distinct preoccupation with the condition of his body—he desires regular baths, dreams he is a woman, and is hopelessly devastated when he loses a limb.
  As the narrative flirts with the conventions of noir fiction but fails to commit, the narrator seems to be trying to reconcile his physical and psychological realities but keeps unravelling at the edges. Once he finds himself in the hospital under strange and increasingly surreal circumstances, the effort of maintaining the continual re-engagement with his environment quickly wears him down. Unable to leave, he prefers to opt for sedated release, trusting his fate to the black male nurse who attends to his care. In the process of recounting his experiences he has now started to slowly narrate himself out of existence. And, ultimately, Atlantic Hotel becomes an unnerving but starkly beautiful parable of alienation, isolation, and the eternal heartache of the human condition.
  —Joseph Schreiber

• Necessary Fiction
  http://necessaryfiction.com/reviews/AtlanticHotelbyJoaoGilbertoNoll
  Word count: 1263

  QUOTE:
  Noll’s fiction displays an unwillingness to make judgments about the actions that take place within them. The question remains as to why.
  The icy answer is that this fictional amoralism has its analogue in real world injustice. There is an assumption that, categorically, perpetrators of violence are burdened by their actions, that liars live in constant fear of exposure.
  Book Reviews · 07/10/2017
  Atlantic Hotel by João Gilberto Noll
  Translated by Adam Morris
  Reviewed by Matthew Spencer

  Two Lines Press, 2017
  João Gilberto Noll died this March at the age of 70. Widely known (at least for a writer of fiction) in his native Brazil, Noll’s reputation is only beginning to be made in the Anglophone world. Two Lines Press has just published a translation of his 1989 novel Hotel Atlântico. That book, along with a novella, Quiet Creature on the Corner, are the extent of his presence on the English market. Adam Morris has served as translator in both instances. Beyond that, a galaxy of questions swirls about his work and what it means.
  Atlantic Hotel is a book of mists, sudden rainshowers, and cold sunlight, the friction of weakened and disabled bodies in shabby rooms. The narrator relates an erratic journey from Rio de Janeiro to Porto Alegre. On his way, he witnesses the deaths of three people under various circumstances. He has casual sex with two others but refuses, because of depression and fatigue, to use the services of a prostitute. His body deteriorates. His clothes rot on his body. The eponymous seaside hotel looms as the final terminus.
  Quite naturally, the narrator is mistaken for a telenovela actor. He encourages the association, even when it places him in mortal danger. He feeds the people around him lines. He takes roles as the situation demands— a priest, a blind man, a political martyr—his identity is as malleable as the situations surrounding him.
  The anticipation of death animates the narrator’s lies, his seductions. The novel begins with a body being taken on a gurney from a hotel in Rio. The sight elicits giddy laughter. It leads him to proposition the girl working the front desk:
  Someday I’ll end up in a coffin, too—so I took the girl’s hand as soon as I stopped laughing and kissed it. With her hand still in mind, she slackened her face, as if a gesture like a kiss on the hand were completely commonplace and even natural at a hotel reception desk. Her long expression opened into a faint smile: “Would you like to speak with a guest, sir, or would you like a room.”
  He tells the clerk a story about having arrived from the airport. He has done no such thing. Later, they have sex “on all fours atop the filthy green carpet” of his room. Other than a certain copacetic mood, there is no intimacy between them. “No touching above the waist, just anonymous haunches seeking each other out pathetically.”
  As the passage above might suggest, the question of misogyny hangs over Noll’s work, this novel as well as Quiet Creature on the Corner. The plot of the latter is set in motion by the rape of the narrator’s girlfriend Glória. There is no motive given for the assault, no contrition on the part of the perpetrator, no justice meted. And while Atlantic Hotel has nothing at that level of sexual violence, the ease with which women offer themselves raises questions about what is being intended here. In general, Noll’s fiction displays an unwillingness to make judgments about the actions that take place within them. The question remains as to why.
  The icy answer is that this fictional amoralism has its analogue in real world injustice. There is an assumption that, categorically, perpetrators of violence are burdened by their actions, that liars live in constant fear of exposure. Recent political events in the United States have given the lie to this sort of folk belief. It bears pointing out that Brazil has its own parallel history of slavery, colonization, labor, and sexual exploitation. These topics gain rather than diminish in Noll’s oblique treatment of them.
  But while the apparent nihilism of Atlantic Hotel is bracing, it also conveys a certain innocence, even a tenderness. Because Noll’s characters are capable of anything, their displays of compassion are particularly striking. There is a kind of divine grace operating, a free and unmerited favor given and received.
  While traveling on a bus, the narrator sits beside a beautiful American woman. She confides to him about her divorce, the loss of a child. She relates the pride she feels working as an archeologist in the Brazilian interior. After introducing themselves, they naturally fall into an intimacy that transcends the need for verbal communication or sexual contact:
  We went hours without talking. When a beautiful sunset began to take shape, something came to my lips—I don’t even know what. I did make out her response: she didn’t think so.
  We remained silent for another half hour. Suddenly, she said it was getting dark. Then, running a hand through her hair, she said this time of day always devastated her. A knot in her throat that formed only as night fell.
  The woman’s subsequent death, by suicide, is shocking but expected. She takes an overdose of pills while the narrator is sleeping. Later, he reads her obituary in the newspaper. The article mentions the death of the child but not her work as an archeologist. Was that really her profession? Her story has every indication of being as false as the narrator’s. Perhaps that is why they could connect so fully.
  Noll’s fiction is one of slippages, some poignant, some terrifying: “When a beautiful sunset began to take shape, something came to my lips—I don’t even know what. I did make out her response: she didn’t think so.” How bizarre and perfectly normal is it to lose track one’s thoughts this way? To lose track of one’s speech? One’s life? Someday we will all end up in a coffin. Noll shows us how every act of intimacy, every act of violence, acts as a prelude to that fate, as well as the lovely vicissitudes that happen in the meantime.
  +++
  João Gilberto Noll (1946–2017) is the author of nearly twenty books. His work appeared in Brazil’s leading periodicals, and he was a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, King’s College London, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. A five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, and the recipient of more than ten awards in all, he died in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the age of 70.
  +
  Adam Morris has a PhD in Latin American Literature from Stanford University and is the recipient of the 2012 Susan Sontag Foundation Prize in literary translation. He is the translator of João Gilberto Noll’s Atlantic Hotel (Two Lines Press, 2017) and Quiet Creature on the Corner (Two Lines Press, 2016), and Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes (Melville House Books, 2014). His writing and translations have been published widely, including in BOMB magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many others. He lives in San Francisco.
  +
  Matthew Spencer lives and writes in Washington State. There is a rose bush outside his office window.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-931883-51-1
  Word count: 407

  QUOTE:
  bizarre mystery,
  does not seem particularly keen on teaching his readers anything by telling this story, but the readers who will enjoy this slim book won't mind the lack of moral lesson; in fact, that's more or less the point.
  Quiet Creature on the Corner
  Joao Gilberto Noll, trans. from the Portuguese by Adam Morris. Two Lines Press (PGW, dist.), $9.95 trade paper (120p) ISBN 978-1-931883-51-1

  Noll is a prize-winning Brazilian author and readers will be delighted that his 1991 mid-career work has now been translated into English. In this bizarre mystery, the unnamed protagonist is a hapless, horny poet in Porto Alegre who's lost his job and is squatting with his mother in an unfinished building. After a brief encounter with a girl who lives upstairs, the poet is arrested for rape and jailed. He is bemused by this, but even more so when he is rescued (or is he?) from the situation by a mysterious man named Kurt, who takes the poet to a large estate in the country where Kurt lives with his wife, Gerda, and a younger relative, Otavio. The poet is given a room supplied with blank sheets of paper, and is asked for nothing in return, "as if they only wanted my negligent company as I wrote my verses." At first he goes for walks; enjoys sexual encounters with the maid, Amalia; and sometimes witnesses strange things that make no sense. But after Gerda gets sick, time begins to play tricks. Kurt is aging—indeed, the poet himself is aging—faster than seems natural. It would appear that this is a tale of a young man in search of identity, but the poet never really registers anything as particularly real or concrete. He seems to wander through a world constructed for him, wondering at its meaninglessness, but with only enough curiosity to keep him putting one foot in front of the other. He is not outraged, as Camus's Meursault is outraged, by the absurdity of the human condition. True to postmodern tradition, the author does not seem particularly keen on teaching his readers anything by telling this story, but the readers who will enjoy this slim book won't mind the lack of moral lesson; in fact, that's more or less the point. (May)
  DETAILS
  Reviewed on: 05/16/2016
  Release date: 05/01/2016
  Open Ebook - 120 pages - 978-1-931883-53-5

• Cleaver
  http://www.cleavermagazine.com/quiet-creature-on-the-corner-by-joao-gilberto-noll-reviewed-by-kc-mead-brewer/
  Word count: 775

  QUOTE:
  Quiet Creature in the Corner is about memory and forgetting, allowing yourself to become so lost that you no longer have a home or self to return to.
  n a life free of worries about money and responsibility, the poet finds himself suddenly absent all ability to write–all the things that once made him himself.
  QUIET CREATURE ON THE CORNER
  by João Gilberto Noll
  translated by Adam Morris
  Two Lines Press, 109 pages
  reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer
  Though João Gilberto Noll has published nearly twenty books, Quiet Creature on the Corner is his first to be translated into English (by the talented Dr. Adam Morris). A five-time recipient of Brazil’s prestigious Prêmio Jabuti, Noll lives in Porto Alegre, which also happens to be the hometown of Quiet Creature’s narrator—an unemployed poet who finds himself in jail for raping his young neighbor, Mariana.
  But then, in a bizarre sequence of events, the poet is soon removed from jail and carted to the Almanova Clinic before then being moved yet again, this time to the mysterious household of Kurt, a German Brazilian, for whom the classic laws of life—time, money, aging, purpose, etc.—no longer seem to apply. As the poet slowly realizes:
  A period had passed since the day Kurt brought me to be with him, and now there was no denying it: this period had been longer than I had supposed.
  And I wondered, a wave of goosebumps passing over the flesh of my scalp: Why this lapse in recognizing such a duration?

  João Gilberto Noll
  Quiet Creature in the Corner is about memory and forgetting, allowing yourself to become so lost that you no longer have a home or self to return to. In this state, the poet no longer feels responsible for his aging, lonely mother, for others he’s hurt, for the crimes he’s committed, for the pain and hunger that wait in the streets just outside his door. —And it’s these classic themes and conflicts that ground Quiet Creature within its surprisingly intense levels of satire and magical realism.
  In his room at Kurt’s home, the poet hangs up an old engraving that he took from the maid Amália’s shed (the same shed where he goes to secretly have sex with her each day). It shows a boat setting sail, an image that prompts Kurt to say, “That engraving evokes, with impressive realism, a farewell to one’s homeland.” The engraving thus becomes the poet’s rather literal writing on the wall. It is the crystallization of all he has left behind in exchange for the soul-mushing comforts of his new reality. And it is this same wholehearted avoidance and denial of all things uncomfortable, all things itchy, unhappy, or difficult, that the poet continues rolling with throughout the entire novel:
  I was afraid [Amália] was pregnant, but my dread lasted only a second, and then I returned to sucking and biting her two breasts, because I remembered it had been a long time since I came inside her, so I could keep on sucking and biting her two breasts with peace of mind … and suddenly Amália let out a yell, and shouted, murderer, murderer, twice, and I, who was wrapped in her arms, got up, took her hand, and saw deep in her eyes a sign of alarm, but concluded that I didn’t feel like deciphering it.
  It isn’t until he’s faced with Kurt’s dying wife, Gerda, in her hospital room, that the poet finally begins to wonder if perhaps his current situation isn’t as comfortable as he’d first imagined:
  Wouldn’t it be better to leave the room and try to forget about the existence of Kurt and Gerda, and find some less blind situation, one as clear as my hand, which opened like a fan in front of the lampshade, my fingers the succinct verses I’d like to have?
  And there’s the rub. Blindness. For writers and poets, there are few artistic tools so vital as having sight, as having memory and clarity. As being present in one’s own life. In Quiet Creature we’re faced with the grotesquerie of a poet’s life as it’s drained of all memory, place, and presence. In a life free of worries about money and responsibility, the poet finds himself suddenly absent all ability to write–all the things that once made him himself.

• Reading in Translation
  https://readingintranslation.com/2016/06/21/the-refracted-existence-joao-gilberto-nolls-quiet-creature-on-the-corner-translated-by-adam-morris/
  Word count: 1451

  QUOTE:
  This slim volume leaves the reader with the same impotence its narrator feels time and again, that desire to grab hold of some deeper meaning which may or may not be just an illusion. And therein lies the source of its power, giving new resonance to the absurdity of the human condition.
  The Refracted Existence: João Gilberto Noll’s Quiet Creature on the Corner, Translated by Adam Morris
  June 21, 2016 · by lschell · in Portuguese · 1 Comment
  Reviewed by Amanda Sarasien
  Perhaps the self is light refracted through a prism: Multiple. Bent by every twist of fate. And ultimately hovering just beyond our reach. Or so Brazilian author João Gilberto Noll’s Quiet Creature on the Corner, recently released in a stirring translation by Adam Morris, provokes us to consider. This slim volume leaves the reader with the same impotence its narrator feels time and again, that desire to grab hold of some deeper meaning which may or may not be just an illusion. And therein lies the source of its power, giving new resonance to the absurdity of the human condition.
  The plot itself is as diaphanous as a dream. The young, unnamed narrator, a squatter in a Porto Alegre slum and sometimes poet, commits a rape for which he is arrested, only to be rescued by an elderly German stranger named Kurt who gives the offender a home with him and his wife on their farm. Why Kurt has taken him in and what his life’s purpose will become, the troubled youth spends the rest of the book wondering. The narrative—thick with familial tension, where everything remains unspoken and physical separations embody the characters’ emotional distance—is overhung with a sense of foreboding, as this young man constantly probes the slightest mannerisms of those around him for some clue as to whether he can rest assured of a continued place in this patchwork family.
  Noll’s is a fascinating, if inscrutable, authorial voice projected through this almost sympathetic narrator. In fact, none of the characters is likeable, but one senses they are real, even if the narrative is punctuated with contradictions. In many ways our guide to this enigmatic world possesses a heightened awareness, a perceptivity to the slightest glance and a mindfulness about the natural world. But in those moments where we most hunger for an insight, he leaves us grasping. We are aware we are the blind being led by the blind, yet just as we begin to surrender to his authenticity, his lyrical prose, we are jarred by some horrifying and inexplicable action, rendered incomplete by the absence of detail and emotional impact, which keeps us at a distance, forces us to question whether this character is, in fact, three-dimensional. Yet are we not also distanced from ourselves? Quiet Creature on the Corner confounds our expectations of what literature should be by denying us the opportunity to see ourselves more clearly through a character, but it is that refusal which enriches the experience all the more.
  The novel is imbued with an overriding sense of the surreal, not merely with regard to the characters’ motivations, but in the narration itself. The troubled youth’s arrival at the farm takes place amid an extended dream which merges the details of past and present—faces from his days in the slum transposed into this rural setting—and propels them years into the future. The dream is so raggedly delineated, interrupted by dreamed awakenings, that the reader cannot be sure where the dream ends and reality begins. We are on just as precarious footing as he is, uncertain whether to take this new life as given, or to hold it suspect. The rest of the story is marked by further distortions, most notably of time, for example when Amália, the family’s servant, returns to the farm and recounts her illegitimate pregnancy, murder of the newborn child and subsequent prison sentence, an episode that logically requires a duration of years. But in the interval, we have been with the narrator for what seems only a matter of weeks, perhaps months. His only reply? “‘So then a long time really has gone by’” (81). Amidst these chronological unmoorings, the narrator repeats like a prayer various iterations of the phrase “It was December” and “the moon was full,” (though it is always December, and the moon is always full), as if trying to get his bearings, convince himself. He uses the growth of his facial hair to attempt a calculation of the passage of time, but seems always to miscalculate.
  If language serves to orient us amid that nebula of human existence, the reader will find that in Quiet Creature on the Corner, it, too, proves frustrating. Nevertheless, language is a key force in this novel, as would be expected from a narrator who uses poetry in a vain attempt to connect with his world, who calls attention to the text as written each time he recounts the arduousness of his creative process. Fittingly, the prose often surpasses the narrator, reaching a sublime, erudite register one would assume impossible for someone of his class. Yet as any writer is painfully aware, language is mercurial: at times elusive (especially when one most depends upon it) and at other times unpredictably fecund, taking on a life of its own:
  The poem I was writing then spoke of a farewell, and in that farewell exploded a hatred that tore through everything: ripped curtains, the walls to sawdust, blood on the lapel. Something was missing at the end of the poem that for three days I labored in vain to find. (41)
  Noll’s stylistics are a play of tantalizing incongruities. Stream-of-conscious and lyrical, until pierced with the discordant syllables of the coarsest argot given its full weight, constantly lulling us into complacent submission only to jolt us into fear and paranoia. Passages that wax poetic in their description of nature, yet are juxtaposed with the muck of base human behavior. Light and dark, both literal and figurative, fuse.
  Morris’ translation deftly displays the full brilliance of this multifaceted prose. Alternating hypnotic run-on sentences, unconventional metaphors and litanies of non-sequitur impressions that possess a rhythm almost like gunshot, the text keeps us as readers on our toes and surely demanded much of the translator. One inspired choice seemed to be the frequent use of the gerund, which permits the narrator to avoid declarative sentences:
  I, in the doorway of the kitchen, thinking it was the first time I’d seen Kurt drunk, I stood in the kitchen doorway wondering if I really wanted to go in and continue with the farce that was unfolding, Kurt tremblingly raising the glass, toasting me, I couldn’t stand him drunk, not Kurt, I could tell what I was observing was an invitation: an old man widowed just hours prior beckoning me into the tavern to keep him company, to drink, drink until dawn with an unhappy man, that was the idea […] (93)
  It conveys a certain tentativeness which so defines this character: Despite his first-person narration, the use of the gerund calls attention to him as an unwilling chronicler, someone incapable of trusting his perceptions, of taking a position in his own interactions with others.
  If there is even a narrow window into the psyche of the character, it would be in his obsession with his own passage to manhood. In this respect, the book is a Bildungsroman, but here perhaps it is a perversion of the form, because the transition is far messier. There is no definitive crossing-over into adulthood, no lesson learned. Nor does the character have an arc. But he wants to believe he has become a man, taking note of his growing muscles, telling himself that it is others’ weakness that is holding him back. One could perhaps read his unexplained sexual deviations as an attempt to combat his own emotional impotence when confronted with the suffering of those around him, the vulnerability of the very adults he wishes could be some sort of role model for him.
  But, this is only conjecture because, ultimately, existence is an asymptote toward understanding, littered with clues that lure us into believing we know ourselves and others. If we had our lives to read over again, we might come to entirely different conclusions. Quiet Creature on the Corner is that prism that with each reading allows us to probe the spectrum of human existence and find new shades of meaning.
  Noll, João Gilberto. Quiet Creature on the Corner. Translated by Adam Morris. San Francisco: Two Lines Press, 2016.

• Biblioklept
  https://biblioklept.org/2016/06/09/a-review-of-joao-gilberto-nolls-surreal-novella-quiet-creature-on-the-corner/
  Word count: 1741

  A review of João Gilberto Noll’s surreal novella Quiet Creature on the Corner
  Posted on June 9, 2016 by Edwin Turner

  Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll’s 1991 novella Quiet Creature on the Corner is new in English translation (by Adam Morris) from Two Lines Press.
  The book is probably best read without any kind of foregrounding or forewarning.
  Forewarning (and enthusiastic endorsement): Quiet Creature on the Corner is a nightmarish, abject, kinetic, surreal, picaresque read, a mysterious prose-poem that resists allegorical interpretation. I read it and then I read it again. It’s a puzzle. I enjoyed it tremendously.
  So…what’s it about?
  For summary, I’ll lazily cite the back of the book:
  …Quiet Creature on the Corner throws us into a strange world without rational cause and effect, where everyone always seems to lack just a few necessary facts. The narrator is an unemployed poet who is thrown in jail after inexplicably raping his neighbor. But then he’s abruptly taken to a countryside manor where all that’s required of him is to write poetry. What do his captors really want from him?
  There’s a lot more going on than that.
  So…what’s it about? What’s the “a lot more”?
  Okay then.
  Maybe let’s use body metaphors. Maybe that will work here.
  We are constantly leaking. Blood, sweat, tears. Piss, shit, decay. Cells sloughing off. Snot trickling. Vomit spewing. Shuffling of this mortal etc.
  (—Are we off to a bad start? Have I alienated you, reader, from my request that you read Noll’s novella?—)
  What I want to say is:
  We are abject: there are parts of us that are not us but are us, parts that we would disallow, discard, flush away. We are discontinuous, rotten affairs. Bodies are porous. We leak.
  We plug up the leaks with metaphors, symbols, tricks, gambits, recollections,  reminiscences. We convert shame into ritual and ritual into history. We give ourselves a story, a continuity. An out from all that abjection. An organization to all those organs. We call it an identity, we frame it in memory.
  What has this to do with Noll’s novella?, you may ask, gentle reader. Well. We expect a narrative to be organized, to represent a body of work. And Quiet Creature on the Corner is organized, it is a body—but one in which much of the connective tissue has been extricated from the viscera.
  We never come to understand our first-person narrator, a would-be poet in the midst of a Kafkaesque anti-quest. And our narrator never comes to understand himself (thank goodness). He’s missing the connective tissue, the causes for all the effects. Quiet Corner exposes identity as an abject thing, porous, fractured, unprotected by stabilizing memory. What’s left is the body, a violent mass of leaking gases liquids solids, shuttling its messy consciousness from one damn place to the next.
  Perhaps as a way to become more than just a body, to stabilize his identity, and to transcend his poverty, the narrator writes poems. However, apart from occasional brusque summaries, we don’t get much of his poetry. (The previous sentence is untrue. The entirety of Quiet Creature on the Corner is the narrator’s poem. But let’s move on). He shares only a few lines of what he claims is the last poem he ever writes: “A shot in the yard out front / A hardened fingernail scraping the tepid earth.” Perhaps Quiet Creature is condensed in these two lines: A violent, mysterious milieu and the artist who wishes to record, describe, and analyze it—yet, lacking the necessary tools, he resorts to implementing a finger for a crude pencil.  Marks in the dirt. An abject effort. A way of saying, “I was here.” A way of saying I.
  Poetry perhaps offers our narrator—and the perhaps here is a big perhaps—a temporary transcendence from the nightmarish (un)reality of his environs. In an early episode, he’s taken from jail to a clinic where he is given a nice clean bed and decides to sleep, finally:
  I dreamed I was writing a poem in which two horses were whinnying. When I woke up, there they were, still whinnying, only this time outside the poem, a few steps a way, and I could mount them if I wanted to.
  Rest, dream, create. Our hero moves from a Porto Alegre slum to a hellish jail to a quiet clinic and into a dream, which he converts into a pastoral semi-paradise. The narrator lives a full second life here with his horses, his farm, a wife and kids. (He even enjoys a roll in the hay). And yet sinister vibes reverberate under every line, puncturing the narrator’s bucolic reverie. Our poet doesn’t so much wake up from his dream; rather, he’s pulled from it into yet another nightmare by a man named Kurt.
  Kurt and his wife Gerda are the so-called “captors” of the poet, who is happy, or happyish, in his clean, catered captivity. He’s able to write and read, and if the country manor is a sinister, bizarre place, he fits right in. Kurt and Gerda become strange parent figures to the poet. Various Oedipal dramas play out—always with the connective tissue removed and disposed of, the causes absent from their effects. We get illnesses, rapes, corpses. We get the specter of Brazil’s taboo past—are Germans Kurt and Gerda Nazis émigrés? Quiet Creature evokes allegorical contours only to collapse them a few images later.
  What inheres is the novella’s nightmare tone and rhythm, its picaresque energy, its tingling dread. Our poet-hero finds himself in every sort of awful predicament, yet he often revels in it. If he’s not equipped with a memory, he’s also unencumbered by one.
  And without memory the body must do its best. A representative passage from the book’s midway point:
  Suddenly my body calmed, normalizing my breathing. I didn’t understand what I was doing there, lying with my head in a puddle of piss, deeply inhaling the sharp smell of the piss, as though, predicting this would help me recover my memory, and the memory that had knocked me to the floor appeared, little by little, and I became fascinated, as what had begun as a theatrical seizure to get rid of the guy who called himself a cop had become a thing that had really thrown me outside myself.
  Here, we see the body as its own theater, with consciousness not a commander but a bewildered prisoner, abject, awakened into reality by a puddle of piss and threatened by external authorities, those who call themselves cops.  Here, a theatrical seizure conveys meaning in a way that supersedes language.
  Indeed our poet doesn’t harness and command language with purpose—rather, he emits it:
  No, I repeated without knowing why. Sometimes a word slips out of me like that, before I have time to formalize an intention in my head. Sometimes on such occasions it comes to me with relief, as though I’ve felt myself distilling something that only once finished and outside me, I’ll be able to know.
  And so, if we are constantly leaking, we leak language too.
  It’s the language that propels Noll’s novella. Each sentence made me want to read the next sentence. Adam Morris’s translation rockets along, employing comma splice after comma splice. The run-on sentences rhetorically double the narrative’s lack of connecting tissue. Subordinating and coordinating conjunctions are rare here. Em dashes are not.
  The imagery too compels the reader (this reader, I mean)—strange, surreal. Another passage:
  Our arrival at the manor.
  The power was out. We lit lanterns.
  I found a horrible bug underneath the stove. It could have been a spider but it looked more like a hangman. I was on my knees and I smashed it with the base of my lantern. The moon was full. The low sky, clotted with stars, was coming in the kitchen window. December, but the night couldn’t be called warm—because it was windy. I was crawling along the kitchen tiles with lantern in hand, looking for something that Kurt couldn’t find. I was crawling across the kitchen without much hope for my search: he didn’t the faintest idea of where I could find it.
  What was the thing Kurt and the narrator searched for? I never found it, but maybe it’s somewhere there in the narrative.
  Quiet Creature on the Corner is like a puzzle, but a puzzle without a reference picture, a puzzle with pieces missing. The publishers have compared the novella to the films of David Lynch, and the connection is not inaccurate. Too, Quiet Creature evokes other sinister Lynchian puzzlers, like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (or Nazi Literature in the Americas, which it is perhaps a twin text to). It’s easy to compare much of postmodern literature to Kafka, but Quiet Creature is truly Kafkaesque. It also recalled to me another Kafkaesque novel, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark—both are soaked in a dark dream logic. Other reference points abound—the paintings of Francis Bacon, Leon Golub, Hieronymus Bosch, Goya’s etchings, etc. But Noll’s narrative is its own thing, wholly.
  I reach the end of this “review” and realize there are so many little details I left out that I should have talked about–a doppelgänger and street preachers, an election and umbanda, Bach and flatulence, milking and mothers…the wonderful crunch of the title in its English translation—read it out loud! Also, as I reach the end of this (leaky) review, I realize that I seem to understand Quiet Creature less than I did before writing about it. Always a good sign.
  João Gilberto Noll’s Quiet Creature on the Corner isn’t for everyone, but I loved it, and look forward to future English translations—Two Lines plans to publish his 1989 novel Atlantic Hotel in the spring of next year. I’ll probably read Quiet Creature again before then. Hopefully I’ll find it even weirder.

• Chicago Review of Books
  https://chireviewofbooks.com/2016/05/05/a-satanic-bildungsroman-quiet-creature-on-the-corner-by-joao-gilberto-noll/
  Word count: 1444

  QUOTE:
  Quiet Creature on the Corner augurs a notable English-language career for João Gilberto Noll. Provocative in both content and structure (think: a Satanic Bildungsroman), this deceptively modest, “one-sitting” novel is oddly accessible yet encourages multiple readings.
  A Satanic Bildungsroman: Quiet Creature on the Corner by João Gilberto Noll
  Despite the renown he has earned in his native Brazil over the past 30 years, João Gilberto Noll is all but invisible in English.

  by Joe Milazzo
  May 5, 2016
  Comments 0

  Despite the renown he has earned in his native Brazil over the past 30 years, João Gilberto Noll is all but invisible in English. The process by which any foreign author is granted entry into the transnational metropolis of “English literature” is often constituted as much out of the contingencies of fiction as it is the inexorabilities of truth. Bolaño, Knausgård, Ferrante—all three have achieved an enduring voguishness that is as much rooted in what Anglophone readers feel they need to know about the world as it is in what Western audiences believe justifies fame (or counts as genius) by virtue of an assumed universal consensus.
  Quiet Creature on the Corner is the first of Noll’s many works to be thus translated, and after closing the covers on this slim, efficiently brutal book, one cannot help but marvel that it has taken so long for an enterprising publisher to open up the canons of American (North as well South) literature to his writing. Although written in the early 1990s, Quiet Creature on the Corner, in its sly satirizing of privilege, imperialism and cultural schizophrenia, feels as urgently relevant as any contemporary novel.
  A synopsis of this book’s plot is fraught with unique risks. Some readers will no doubt refuse to follow a narrator who, in the first 20 pages, admits to raping one of his neighbors, then spends the rest of the novel in cozy confinements which ostensibly transcend both consequence and justice. Others might find this nameless narrator’s obtuseness too evocative of Camus or Kafka. And others still might be disinclined to give their attention to yet another fiction from Latin America that traffics in the tropes of so-called magical realism: characters who age at an unnaturally rapid rate; a poet who never actually composes any poetry, save on a napkin salvaged from an airport lunch counter; a persistent if indistinct haze of military violence hovering on every event’s horizon; and countless sensations that may or may not be hallucinations.
  However, it would be a mistake to contextualize Noll’s narrative choices purely in terms of style. Like Mario de Andrade’s autochthonous Modernist fable Macunaíma or Cesar Aira’s improvisatory novellas, Quiet Creature on the Corner employs the rawest of narrative materials—”what happens”—to explore important questions regarding causality and the political abuses thereof.
  Within the very first paragraph, our narrator declares he has just lost his job. As he returns to the apartment where he and his mother are squatting in Noll’s own home town of Porto Alegre, we are introduced to the particular textures that define poverty in this world. “My mother remarked that the milk was thick. Indeed, there were rings of fat down the sides of the glass.” Appetites are everything, whether satisfied in the form of soap operas watched on a “black and white TV that didn’t get all the channels”, a “slobbery joint” passed between teenagers killing time in the shadow of “a building whose construction was paralyzed right from the git-go”, or a beautiful young woman “singing a song that wasn’t half bad.” Any opportunity to exchange mere subsistence for pleasure here is to be seized. But with whom do we align ourselves when our pleasures result in the subjection of others?
  How Noll chooses to answer that question is what lends Quiet Creature on the Corner both its frisson and its perplexity. Jailed only temporarily, the narrator is transferred to the Almanova Clinic in nearby São Leopoldo, where he eventually comes under the care of a German Brazilian named Kurt. He becomes a member of Kurt’s household, and falls into a rhythm that perverts the passage of time even as he’s aware that this rhythm—or tempo, arrhythmic; rubato?—is separating him more and more from the possibility of a life that is actually alive. (Even if, as the lone explicit dream in this dream-like narrative suggests, that life would be a peasant’s lot.)
  All the same, our narrator cannot help but luxuriate in his apparent freedom, except in those moments when he acutely feels the potential loss of the licenses he enjoys. “I was getting dragged out from my situation under Kurt’s wing: if I got thrown in jail again he’d never give me another chance and I’d find myself face-to-face with complete shit all over again…” This anxiety is further accompanied by a drift into more conventional, if not healthy, desires.
  … I was no loner a young boy, but a man in the fullness of my functions in need of a woman to keep my company—Kurt would need to give his blessing to this union, preferably with a blonde girl like Gerda [Kurt’s just-deceased wife] seemed she’d once been, he’d be so satisfied he’d give me half his fortune, opening the way not only to Germany but to who knows what other quadrants, and once I’d divorced the dumb blonde, a different woman in every hotel room.
  With their manic logic, these passages encapsulate the narrator’s temporal existence under the influence of his own unfettered capacity to consume. Of course everyone around him is dying exponentially faster than he is; of course he is subject to lapses in memory; of course his perception of duration is impaired. And his contentedness, while only rarely disturbed, emerges as the chief source of whatever discomfort we readers experience in his company. The narrator does not comprehend how his choices—no longer aesthetic, but libidinal—have unleashed the colonizing violence of avarice, racism, classism, and an interpretation of history that awards subjectivity to the victors alone.
  Adam Morris’s translation deserves special mention in this regard. William Arrowsmith once noted, “the act of translation presupposes a prior act of criticism.” Morris’s English rendition of Noll’s Portuguese feels interpretative in that sense. For example, the narrator declares himself a poet, but as his language angles to secure his grasp on success, it contorts itself into shapes that parody his existential parataxis. “The strong burning smell left me a little stupid, and into my head leaped the hypothesis that Kurt had set me up, that he’d never give anything up. I turned my belly to the sky, exhaled slowly. Overhead, an airplane was heading south.”
  By pairing blunt diction with supple prosody and supporting a casual, even cool, “telling it like it is” tone, Morris’s translation effectively  discloses the dread and misgiving knotted up in the correspondences that seem always to work in the narrator’s favor.
  Quiet Creature on the Corner augurs a notable English-language career for João Gilberto Noll. Provocative in both content and structure (think: a Satanic Bildungsroman), this deceptively modest, “one-sitting” novel is oddly accessible yet encourages multiple readings. One of the final images that tantalizes both the narrator and the reader here is a bonfire: “… it looked like a party had just ended, at the base of the fire things were already unrecognizable, twisted, various flames around them…”
  Object and symbol alike are destroyed in this conflagration. And, as the narrator glimpses through the distorting lens of his miraculous “inheritance”, this fire reduces itself to ashes the more he stokes the warmth it provides him. And so causality, from the perspective of the oppressed, is anything but reassuring. Causality is worse than any absurdity, however fortunate. Causality is the essence of catastrophe.
  Joe Milazzo is a writer, editor, educator, and designer in Dallas. He is the author of the novel Crepuscule W/ Nellie (Jaded Ibis Press) and The Habiliments (Apostrophe Books). His writings have appeared in Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, BOMB, The Collagist, Drunken Boat, Tammy, and elsewhere. He co-edits the online interdisciplinary arts journal [out of nothing], is a contributing editor at Entropy, and is also the proprietor of Imipolex Press.
  FICTION
  Quiet Creature on the Corner by João Gilberto Noll, translated by Adam Morris
  Two Lines Press
  Published May 10, 2016
  ISBN 9781931883511

• Kenyon Review
  https://www.kenyonreview.org/reviews/quiet-creature-on-the-corner-by-joao-gilberto-noll-738439/
  Word count: 1334

  QUOTE:
  Quiet Creature on the Corner raises a more important statement, one that touches on the limits of human perception, understanding, consciousness, knowledge, communication, and agency.
  It’s about the imprisoned isolation of the artist, the docile passivity of the individual, the easy satiety of sex, the mutual separateness of people, the institutional pre-mapping of fate, and no doubt many other things I’ve missed. But more than that, it’s simply an intoxicating book, one that many will greedily ingest in a single sitting and one that introduces English speakers to a major figure in Brazilian literature.
  Life as Dark Broth: Quiet Creature on the Corner by João Gilberto Noll
  Simon Chandler
  Trans. Adam Morris. San Francisco, CA: Two Lines Press, 2016. 120 pages. $9.95.
  It’s always nice to know just what a celebrated author thinks about life, and when he opens Quiet Creature on the Corner with the allusive sentence, “A dark broth running from my hands beneath the faucet,” João Gilberto Noll doesn’t disappoint. On its own, this figurative line might not convey too much in the way of significance, but when coupled with a novel that puppeteers its helpless protagonist from one confounding scenario to the next, it introduces a vision of existence that casts the individual as fundamentally passive, detached, impotent, and uncomprehending. While the Brazilian author has plumbed into such a motif with previous novels and stories written in his native tongue, Quiet Creature on the Corner represents a rare opportunity to experience him and his distinctively anti-existentialist voice in the English language. Rendered from the 1991 original by San Franciscan translator Adam Morris, it depicts a young poet as he’s pulled from one life event to the next, without ever knowing what exactly he’s doing or why he’s doing it.
  Admittedly, such a theme of powerlessness and bewilderment is hardly new in literature, but what sets Noll apart is his ability to communicate the passivity of his anti-hero implicitly rather than explicitly, embedding it in the very form and style of the novel rather than in any direct narration or dialogue. From the very beginning, from the loss of the unnamed poet’s job to his tendency to “suddenly [find himself] stopped in Acelino de Carvalho alley,” he’s shifted abruptly from one place to the other, the lack of agency and control deftly evoked by omissions, vaguenesses of detail, discontinuities, and non sequiturs. All of a sudden, as it were, this unfortunate inclination results in him being distracted one night by “someone singing, a high-pitched voice.” Entranced by the female in possession of this voice, he quickly realizes “I was so close to the singing girl that I could almost feel her breath”—so close, in fact, that he mindlessly rapes her.
  Of course, the word rape or anything synonymous with it isn’t ever used, heightening the suggestion that the protagonist has no definite idea of what he’s doing and therefore no particular authorship over his own life. Still, this doesn’t change the fact that he makes himself a criminal, and it’s precisely when he’s arrested for his rash crime that the book becomes stranger still. Having already spent much of his adolescence in Porto Alegre detached from reality in “the public library” where he wasted hours “taking in the lives of poets,” he’s inexplicably whisked away from jail and taken by a German called Kurt to a “clinic,” where he’s more or less obliged to read and compose poetry. At one point, he narrates, “I thought about how they gave me very little to do besides write poems,” thereby suggesting that the novel is also a comment on the life of the artist, on his or her inability to really understand or act upon the world except through the medium of his or her art.
  But even more than for this kind of implicit metaphor, Quiet Creature on the Corner becomes so enjoyable at this juncture for what can only be called its realistic surrealism. By virtue of the elliptical and ambiguous prose highlighted above, it produces an engrossingly dreamlike atmosphere that’s entirely plausible and down-to-earth without having to lapse into anything like magical realism or outright fantasy. Halfway through the book, for instance, the poet remarks on the departure of a maid from the clinic in São Leopoldo, only to be precipitously transported to a toilet seat in Rio de Janeiro in the next paragraph:
  That same day Amália disappeared. Otávio said he’d heard she followed the colonists’ caravan.
        Now I was sitting on the toilet, elbows to knees, looking out at what the doorframe let me see of the rest of my hotel room in Rio.
  The effect of this disjunctive writing is to dislocate the reader somewhat from the novel’s fabric, to lend this fabric a seductive veneer or aura of unreality. As publisher Two Lines Press note in their blurb for the book, Noll’s seamless yet fragmented style is “reminiscent of the films of David Lynch,” and when reading his depictions of senseless crimes and bizarre housemate fights, it’s certainly possible to conjure the broken atmosphere of Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive. And much like Lynch, Noll understands only too well that the best way to manipulate the audience’s sense of reality is to manipulate the audience’s sense of time. This is evident not only in its instantaneous transitions but also in how, throughout the novel, the unnamed poet is repeatedly at a loss to explain the runaway ageing of his companions, musing of the mysterious Kurt, “this man had really aged beyond his years, he was getting into the taxi with such difficulty that it left my mouth agape, thinking about how unprepared I was to track the passage of time.”
  And from this inability to track chronology, the protagonist remains ultimately severed from his environment, his existence and the people around him. He consistently acts “as though there were a soundproof glass between me and what I was watching,” and he consistently fails to understand why exactly Kurt and his wife Gerda had saved him from prison: “What’s happening? I asked myself. What am I doing that would make him so decisively happy?” It’s from this uncertainty surrounding the motives and mindsets of others that much of the novel’s intrigue and impetus stems, yet it probably goes without saying that Noll deprives almost every puzzle of an overt answer, opting instead to leave his anti-hero and the reader pondering such questions as, “What was [Kurt] doing there, in the kitchen, with his arms crossed over the table, the low lamp brightening his rope-veined hands? What was he doing there, at that time of night, when I got back to the manor?”
  Ultimately Noll sacrifices the resolution of such questions so as to ensure that Quiet Creature on the Corner raises a more important statement, one that touches on the limits of human perception, understanding, consciousness, knowledge, communication, and agency. Some may feel shortchanged by his reluctance to make this statement more transparent and unequivocal, but ironically it’s because he gives away so little that the book itself gives so much, becoming a highly suggestive and evocative tale whose cryptic minimalism allows for a multitude of possible readings. It’s about the imprisoned isolation of the artist, the docile passivity of the individual, the easy satiety of sex, the mutual separateness of people, the institutional pre-mapping of fate, and no doubt many other things I’ve missed. But more than that, it’s simply an intoxicating book, one that many will greedily ingest in a single sitting and one that introduces English speakers to a major figure in Brazilian literature. Let’s just hope we aren’t all as tragically powerless and impulsive as it makes us out to be.

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