Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Ancient Tillage
WORK NOTES: trans by K.C.S. Sotelino
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 11/27/1935
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Brazil
NATIONALITY: Brazilian
http://www.ndbooks.com/author/raduan-nassar/ * https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/raduan-nassar/118056/ * http://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/why-brazils-greatest-writer-stopped-writing * http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/raduan-nassar-became-a-brazilian-sensation-with-his-first-novel-now-published-in-english-the-world-a6877851.html *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 27, 1935, in Pindorama, São Paolo, Brazil.
EDUCATION:Attended the University of São Paulo.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and farmer. Jornal do Bairro, cofounder and editor-in-chief, c. 1967-73.
AWARDS:Jabuti Prize, and Brazilian Academy of LettersPrize, both for Ancient Tillage; São Paulo Art Critics’ Association Prize, for A Cup of Rage; Camões Prize, 2016.
WRITINGS
Lavoura arcaica and Um copo de cólera have been adapted for film in Brazil.
SIDELIGHTS
Brazilian author Raduan Nassar attended the University of São Paulo, where he studied philosophy and law. He then went on to publish his first novel, Lavoura Arcaica in 1975. His novella, Um copo de cólera, followed in 1978, and both were instant cult classics. Nassar was hailed by Brazilian critics, and readers soon followed suit. Both books were also adapted as movies. Yet, in 1984, Nassar announced his retirement from writing, and he became a farmer instead. Nassar ran a large-scale commercial farm until retiring in 2011, and he donated his land to the Federal University of São Carlos with the instruction that it serve as the site for a new campus.
While Nassar achieved lasting literary fame with only two books before he stopped writing, a collection of short stories and complete works, Menina a caminho e outros textos and Obra completa, were released in 1997 and 2016, respectively. Both books, however, only contain writing from the 1960s and 1970s, so despite his fans’ hopes, it seems that Nassar has truly retired, even as his renown has grown. Both Lavoura Arcaica and Um copo de cólera were brought to English-speaking readers in 2017, and once again, both books have received critical acclaim.
Ancient Tillage
Lavoura Arcaica, which was translated as Ancient Tillage, is a coming-of-age tale about a young man named Andre. The protagonist has lived all his life on his family’s farm in Brazil, and Nassar portrays Andre’s thoughts as he attends to the livestock. Nassar also portrays Andre’s fraught relationship to his family. Andre’s father is overbearing and religious, and he insists on controlling his son’s every move while imposing his faith on Andre as well. As Andre attempts to placate his father, he also struggle with his growing feelings for his own sister, Ana. Appalled by his taboo desires, and their continued growth, Andre flees the family farm, heads to the city, and holes up in a boardinghouse. There Andre spends most of his time drinking, and then his brother Pedro arrives, insisting that he return home. Andre must choose between facing his family and forever remaining in self-imposed exile.
In the words of a Kirkus Reviews critic, “Nassar is tremendously adept at capturing the existential anguish of a troubled mind. It’s not easy or uplifting reading, but his dark view of the world commands attention.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer was also impressed, asserting that “the novel’s conclusion, taking place at a homecoming party for Andre, is breathtaking in its almost mythological expansiveness.” Praising the novel further, online Shelf Awareness correspondent Scott Neuffer announced that it “offers a Dionysian rush of lyricism.” Neuffer went on to advise: “Deeply stirring and unforgettable, Ancient Tillage is nothing short of a literary masterpiece.”
A Cup of Rage
Although the A Cup of Rage is under fifty pages, the novella presents a powerful emotional tale filed with political and cultural subtext. The story follows an unnamed man and an unnamed woman. The older man and younger woman are deep in the midst of a passionate love affair, yet things turn ugly when the man becomes upset that insects have eaten a hole into his hedge. The woman thinks that the event isn’t worth becoming upset over, and this seemingly small disagreement turns into a violently passionate argument. Eventually the man strikes the woman and she leaves him for good, but the lead-up to this climax explores both internal and external power struggles, and is as much an allegory about fascism as it is about romance.
According to a Kirkus Reviews columnist, “each of the brief chapters here is made up of just a sentence or two that run for pages at a time, capturing the breathlessness of lust and rage.” Indeed, a Publishers Weekly contributor found that “the impeccably intricate structure . . . and the intense style lend a great deal of intellectual weight to this powerful, challenging work.” Nicholas Lezard, writing in the Guardian Online, offered praise as well, and he remarked that A Cup of Rage “packs more power into its scant forty-seven pages than most books do into five or 10 times as many. . . . It is, in fact, incredibly sexy. An ‘erotic cult novel’ claims the blurb on the back, and that is, if you will excuse the phrase, bang on. The sex at the beginning is steamy, and all the better for there not being a single lazy verbal shortcut to eroticism in it.” As Ciat Conlin put it in an online Quarterly Conversation assessment, “all of a sudden, the slow, aching opening chapters give way to an explosion of tensions. This effect arises not just from the novel’s structure as a continuous sentence, but from the activity Nassar conveys, as characters run, trip, follow, hurtle, and scream from one page to the next, all without a single full stop.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews. November 15, 2016, review of Ancient Tillage; November 15, 2016, review of A Cup of Rage.
Publishers Weekly, October 3, 2016, review of A Cup of Rage; November 7, 2016, review of Ancient Tillage.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (January 12, 2016), Nicholas Lezard, review of A Cup of Rage.
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (December 12, 2016), Ciat Conlin, review of A Cup of Rage.
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (February 14, 2017), Scott Neuffer, review of Ancient Tillage.*
Raduan Nassar became a Brazilian sensation with his first novel - now published in English, the world will come knocking
A demonically charged writer, Raduan Nassar retired from fiction and took up farming. Now the recluse's work is available in English, as his translator Stefan Tobler explains
Stefan Tobler
Tuesday 16 February 2016 19:45 GMT
2 comments
2K
Click to follow
The Independent Culture
raduan-nassar.jpg
The Brazilian DH Lawrence: Raduan Nassar shunned the elites and hierarchies of literary society in favour of physical, less solitary work
This year, as the eyes of the world turn to Brazil – lapping up its food, music, natural beauty and, of course, the sporting extravaganza of the Olympic Games – you need only dip into the country's literature to experience an altogether different narrative.
Brazilian fiction is riding the crest of a wave, which came crashing on to the international scene after a spot as Guest of Honour at the 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest and most influential trade fair for books. Fresh translations of classic authors have followed in quick succession, as well as striking emergent voices from the generation born after the military dictatorship came to an end in the mid-1980s. No longer need our knowledge of Brazilian writing be limited to the publishing phenomenon Paulo Coelho – whose most famous novel, The Alchemist, holds the Guinness world record for being the most widely translated book by a living author.
Latin American fiction in general is more popular now than ever, partly because of the adventurous and experimental influence of writers such as the Argentinian César Aira and the Chilean Roberto Bolaño, and partly because there is so much that still needs to be written about in Latin America. Subjection, violence and repression on the basis of gender, class, race and politics are so inescapable in the region that its writers, should they choose to, have rich material to draw on. (Take, for example, Bolaño's international bestseller, 2666, set partly in Ciudad Juárez on the Mexico-US border, in which the authorities demonstrate a staggering indifference to hundreds of rapes and murders, all of poor women from the factories.)
Read more
Roald Dahl's life, and how it shaped his stories: Week in Books
Eight books to read before you turn 30
13 best Goosebumps books that ruined your childhood
Should you judge a bookshop by its cover? Probably
I've seen so much urgent and exciting writing break out of the region in recent years that it's no surprise that the press I run, And Other Stories, has a list heavily weighted towards Latin American writers; nor is it surprising that other publishers, among them the independent presses New Directions, Coffee House, Open Letter and Deep Vellum, also have strengths in Latin American writing. There really is more than enough to go around. And though this new-found optimism has begun to falter in Brazil itself – in recession and with politics and industry mired in corruption scandals – this is, in itself, grist for the literary mill.
But one writer you might not expect to burst on to the scene is Raduan Nassar, a recluse who hasn't published a thing in 30 years. And yet his novels – now being published in English for the first time – offer a deep insight into the turmoil of a society riven with divisions of race, class and gender. Nassar's own story is something of an enigma. After publishing two works in the 1970s that revolutionised Brazilian literature, he stopped writing in 1984. He distanced himself from literary coteries and conversations, left the city of São Paulo, and became a farmer. But over the 30-odd years since he withdrew from public life, his fame has continued to grow. Now, he may well be the most highly acclaimed living writer in Brazil. And yet apart from one in-depth interview in 1996, he has refused all approaches from the press and, until now, escaped English attention.
sao-paulo-getty.jpg
Scratch the surface: Brazilian fiction is increasingly concerned with exposing society in all its vibrant tensions
When he turned 80 in November last year, Nassar unplugged his phone. When a Brazilian reporter had called him days earlier, asking for an interview, he had refused, laughing: “I have many defects in my character, but not this one, at least so I think – I'm not a show-off.” Though a colloquium was held in his honour at the University of São Paulo to celebrate the occasion, he refused to go. Nor is his resistance to public acclaim new: his 1975 debut – indeed, only – full-length novel, Ancient Tillage, was only published in the first place after a copy was sent to a publisher without his permission.
Yet Nassar's writing couldn't be kept quiet. After conquering the critics, the Brazilian public gradually discovered his work. After films were made of both the novel and his novella A Cup of Rage, a much wider readership was secured. And though, over the years, the author has resisted translations of his works, he is now being published by Penguin, as only the third ever Brazilian novelist to enter their Modern Classics list, joining the ranks of George Orwell and Marcel Proust.
As a mark of the books' growing status, there are new Spanish translations by the Mexican writer of Down the Rabbit Hole, Juan Pablo Villalobos. French, German and Italian editions already exist, published by leading publishing houses. So if he wished to, Nassar would certainly have plenty to celebrate. And if he won't celebrate, others will.
Nassar's taboo-breaking treatment of sex and his frank depictions of violence, and especially that directed at women, mines the same seam as Bolaño and many other great Latin American writers. In the only interview we have to hold on to, given two decades ago this year, Nassar makes clear the impact that witnessing brutality had on him: “I was seven or eight years old and was up in an orange tree at the bottom of our back yard, when I heard the screams of a woman who was being thrashed from the neighbour's yard […] I could hear the crack of the whip, but I couldn't see anything […] The fact that I could neither see the scene, nor identify the people, must have traumatised me profoundly. There were just the screams and the whipping.”
Five of the best Brazilian writers, past and present
5 show all
Nassar's writing is powerful partly because it does not carry moral judgements but rather lived experiences, voiced by narrators who are not always nice people. They offer glimpses into dark forces that exist within every society. His narrators are swept up in dangerous ecstasies, their moral scruples utterly forgotten. Asked about this, he said: “I think one of the preconditions of our supposed freedom is being on friendly terms with the devil. I couldn't imagine leaving him out when writing.”
In 1978, Nassar's fiery and erotically charged novella A Cup of Rage appeared. An older, chauvinist farmer tells of the furious argument that engulfs him and his younger, urban, feminist girlfriend after she spends the night on his farm. Neither character comes out of it well. Nassar gives us the painful glibness of the middle-class woman's liberal posturing as well as an egotistical male, whose mouth runs away from him into bombast and ravings, and whose violence is triggered by something no bigger than leaf-cutter ants: “I wanted silence, since I was enjoying letting my eyes linger on the fresh leaves of the mulberry trees, which stood out in the landscape because of their brazen greenness (beautiful as anything!), but my eyes were suddenly led, and when these things happen you never really know what devil's at work, and, in spite of the mist, I see this: a gap in my hedge…” From this moment, the terrible gender and class chasm that opens up between the two characters carries an electric buzz. A palpable threat of violence is in the air. Their fury speaks more widely to the ugly inequalities in Brazilian society, though of course such injustices are present in our own, too.
For Malaysians Only: How You Can Make Additional Income…Ace Profits Academy
He Shares How He Always Profit From Stocks 30 Mins A D…Wealth Creation Mentors
Woman Born Without Legs Abandoned At Birt…LifeDaily.com
by Taboola
Sponsored Links
The writing has the sheer unstoppable force of a child's temper tantrum, and only on a second read – or as an editor or translator – do you see the intricate patterns and repetitions that combine to produce this crushing emotional onslaught. He plays fast and loose with standard syntax and punctuation to convey the turmoil and onward rush of his characters. Most of his pages-spanning chapters in A Cup of Rage are a single long, evocative sentence. After the languidly drawn-out chapter “The Shower” slowly unwinds its string of progressive verbs – “pulling… rubbing… massaging… scratching” – there is a shift, as the scene approaches the satisfaction of its conclusion, to a more direct past tense: “I only know that I delivered myself absolutely into her hands.”
As I translated the book, I loved the freedom of Nassar's word choices, too. He occasionally makes words up, and mixes colloquial speech with high-flown phrases. When I asked well-read Brazilians they confirmed the individuality of his choices. On one occasion, for example, Nassar has the girlfriend say to the narrator: “It's unbelievable how you are mirrorizing”, the addition of a stuffy suffix suggesting some kind of regurgitated psychobabble.
Ancient Tillage has a story no less highly charged, this time told in a more lyrical prose with Biblical overtones. The narrator, André, is a prodigal son who has fled his family's farm for the city in rebellion against his strict, religious father. André is also running from his love for his sister. Although set on the farm of an immigrant Lebanese family in Brazil (Nassar's own parents arrived in Brazil from the Lebanon in 1920, 15 years before his birth), the novel has a Mediterranean ambience – a pre-modern atmosphere in which classical myth, Greek tragedy, New Testament Galilee and European and Arab cultures rub up against each other. It is the fruit both of the author's breadth of reference and of his interest in the intermingling of cultures that he saw on his own doorstep.
At André's coming-home party, we see a Biblical parable and a Greek myth. A circle of dancers forms as his elderly uncle, like Pan, the ancient god of drunken ruts and debauchery, “took his flute from his pocket, a delicate stem, in his heavy hands and began to blow into it like a bird, his cheeks inflating like those of a child, and his cheeks swelled so much, got so puffy and flushed, it seemed all his wine would flow from his ears, as if from a tap”.
The intensity of Nassar's writing and its fusion of the erotic, natural and mystical have led to comparisons with DH Lawrence, while his untamed language reminds us of his fellow Brazilian Clarice Lispector, who, nearly 40 years after her death in 1977, has recently won the adoration of English readers and, to my delight, featured prominently on almost every Book of the Year list last year.
Someone also suggested that A Cup of Rage has echoes of James Joyce's Ulysses, but Nassar claims to have little time for the literary canon. “It's worse to kneel down before a work of art than to deface it,” he once commented: “It's obscene to raise some so-called great individuals so high that the common man is reduced to the size of an insect.” Nassar's scepticism about idols came, he says, when, as a 19-year-old, he read the work of the philosopher Francis Bacon; reverence for idols, said Bacon, can hinder the progress of knowledge. But it's also probable that Nassar's small-town rural upbringing and his left-wing student days in the late 1950s and early 1960s also increased his distaste for elites and hierarchies.
His desire for work that was physical, agrarian and less solitary was there all along. In 1965 he set himself up as a rabbit farmer only to close the operation down just a couple of years later in order to set up a newspaper with his siblings. He was editor for almost a decade, positioning the paper as a thorn in the side of the dictatorship. It was during this time he started to write fiction, too, and when he left the newspaper in 1974 he dedicated himself to it entirely. But then, in the 1980s, he just stopped – seemingly for good. Why, remains a mystery. In the 1996 interview he suggests that he was fed up with writers' narcissistic need for applause. He decided to redirect his energies into full-time farming. Whatever his reasons, when Nassar dedicated himself to his new venture he went all in, buying 640 hectares of beautiful, lush land, including eight lakes and 80 hectares of virgin forest, three hours' drive from the clamour of São Paulo. He kept the forest and developed the rest into a thriving farm with four silos and fields of wheat, maize, beans, soy and oats. Ten people worked on the farm. “Today, my life is all doing,” he said. “Although it has this in common with literature: I don't know why I'm doing it. So I keep on doing, doing, doing.” (Which makes you wonder if – or, hope that – the “doing” of literature may have continued all along, away from the prying eyes of hungry publishers?)
Now, in another surprise twist to the tale, Nassar has donated his farm to a university, allowing it to set up a campus for agricultural studies on the land. He continues to live in the country much of the time, although he also has a small flat in São Paulo.
He is not a recluse like JD Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. He has nothing against visitors. When in São Paulo, he sometimes welcomes individual visitors, including wandering translators like me. He is happy to talk. He smokes as he talks. His eyes gleam mischievously and his smile is disarming, often broad, at times breaking into laughter. He makes it clear that he hasn't kept up with all the new writing and would prefer to talk about things other than literature. But when our conversation turns to his books, he stresses that for him the most important thing about them was the pleasure he had in their writing, rather than in their critical success. And yet, though he would never say so, it's clear that he takes pride in his work, as he should – but, apparently, without feeling the slightest need to write one sentence more.
Two new translations of the work of Raduan Nassar, by Stefan Tobler and Karen Sherwood Sotelino, are available now in Penguin Modern Classics
Why Brazil’s Greatest Writer Stopped Writing
In 1984, at the height of his literary fame, Raduan Nassar announced his retirement, to become a farmer.
By Alejandro Chacoff
January 21, 2017
Raduan Nassar was forty-eight and at the height of his literary fame when, in 1984, he announced his retirement. He wanted to become a farmer.
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN KIRCHNER
In 1973, the Brazilian writer Raduan Nassar quit his job. After six years as editor-in-chief at the Jornal do Bairro, an influential left-wing newspaper that opposed Brazil’s military regime, he had reached an impasse with one of the co-founders, who was also his older brother. The paper had until then been distributed for free, and the brothers couldn’t agree on whether to charge subscribers. Nassar, then thirty-seven, left the paper, and spent a year in his São Paulo apartment, working twelve hours a day on a book, “crying the whole time.” In “Ancient Tillage,” the strange, short novel he wrote, a young man flees his rural home and family, only to return, chastened and a little humiliated, to the place of his childhood.
“Ancient Tillage” was published in 1975, to immediate critical acclaim. It won the best-début category of the Jabuti prize, Brazil’s main literary honor, and another prize from the Brazilian Academy of Letters. In 1978, a second novel appeared in print; Nassar had written the first draft of “A Cup of Rage” in 1970, while living in Granja Viana, a bucolic neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. It, too, was received euphorically, winning the São Paulo Art Critics’ Association Prize (ACPA). “Those two books had a very strong impact,” Antonio Fernando de Franceschi, a poet and critic who became a close friend of Nassar’s, told me. “They are small, hard rocks. Everything is concentrated there.” Last year, Nassar’s two novels were translated into English for the first time, for the Penguin Modern Classics Series—New Directions will publish them this month in the U.S.—and “A Cup of Rage,” translated by Stefan Tobler, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
Nassar’s novels quickly caught the eye of publishers in France and Germany and, by the early nineteen-eighties, with two short books that together amounted to fewer than three hundred pages, he was already being hailed as one of Brazil’s greatest writers, mentioned in the same breath as Clarice Lispector and João Guimarães Rosa. On visits to Paris, he was invited to speak at the Sorbonne, and doted on by the publishing heir Claude Gallimard and the famous Catalan literary agent Carmen Balcells. A close friend to Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Pablo Neruda, whose estates she looked after, Balcells is often thought to have been responsible for the vaguely defined but highly marketable concept of the Latin American Boom, a growth in the global appetite for the region’s literature during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Back then, she sought out Nassar to join the club. “She expected something big,” he told me last year, when we met for the first time, at his home in São Paulo. “She was a very generous person.”
Nassar was forty-eight and at the height of his literary fame when, in 1984, he gave an interview with Folha de São Paulo, the country’s biggest daily newspaper, in which he announced his retirement. He wanted to become a farmer. “My mind is lit up with other things now; I’m looking into agriculture and stockbreeding,” he told the interviewer. Many were baffled. Nassar kept his word. The following year, he bought a property of roughly sixteen hundred acres and began to plant soy, corn, beans, and wheat.
“I gave up a lot of things then, you have no idea,” he told me that afternoon. Nassar, who is now eighty-one years old, lives alone in a discreet, red-brick building in one of the quieter parts of Vila Madalena, a bohemian neighborhood on the city’s west side. In 2011, after almost three decades spent tending to crops, Nassar donated his land to the Federal University of São Carlos, on the condition that they build an extra campus to give better access to rural communities. The campus is now up and running; Nassar spoke of a former farm employee whose daughter was studying there.
Nassar’s living room is sparsely furnished, with an old, yellowing clock on the wall and a black-and-white portrait of his parents above his desk. There are no bookshelves in the living room, but there was a short row of books on the mantelpiece: André Gide, Dostoevsky (a writer he especially loves), and many old volumes of Caldas Aulete, a Portuguese dictionary. I noticed haphazard piles of crisp new books on his side tables and couch. “Those are gifts,” he said. “I tell people I don’t read anymore, but they never believe me.”
Writers who choose not to exercise their talents can provoke a range of reactions in readers and fellow-writers, from envy to exasperation to awe. Nassar’s early retirement was received in Brazil with a sort of fascination tinged by a hint of offense. In deciding to become a farmer—not an idle dweller but the owner of a productive, medium-sized fazenda—he had downgraded the status of literature.
Publishers suspected he hadn’t entirely stopped. “One of the great obsessions of our press over these past decades has been to discover whether he has any hidden poems or stories in his drawers,” Luiz Schwarcz, the editor-in-chief of Companhia das Letras, the country’s main publishing house, told me. Schwarcz was talking in part about himself. When he founded his publishing house, in the late eighties, he called Nassar. “I told him, ‘Luiz, look, I have no book for you,’ ” Nassar told me. “By then I was already deep into rural life.”
Nassar’s interest in farming goes back to his childhood. His parents emigrated from Lebanon to Brazil in the twenties, settling in Pindorama, a tiny rural town in the state of São Paulo. Nassar and his nine siblings were raised on a small plot of land where his father grew orange, cherry, and jabuticaba trees, and reared birds and rabbits. His mother was a superb chicken breeder, he told me, but her specialty was turkeys. “Once my father gave me two guinea fowls,” he said, the lines of his face crinkling with the pleasing memory. “I was so damn excited about that.”
His father was an Orthodox Christian, and his mother a Protestant, but the children were raised Catholic to stave off discrimination. Nassar, an altar boy, used to wake up every day at 5 A.M. to take communion. When Nassar was sixteen, he moved to São Paulo, the capital, where he studied language and law, before switching to philosophy at the University of São Paulo. In 1967, he and four of his brothers founded the Jornal do Bairro.
“Ancient Tillage,” a version of the prodigal-son parable, is both a celebration of André’s ties to the land and his family and an almost nihilistic condemnation of these ties. The son of a rural patriarch, André is tormented by incestuous feelings toward his sister. He flees the family to wallow in a lodging, drinking and visiting prostitutes; his brother Pedro attempts to bring him back home. The story’s biblical language manages to be simultaneously sincere and mocking; Nassar is particularly good at casting a dark, troubling shadow over his nostalgic vision of rural life. In one scene, André remembers the experience of gathering up “the wrinkled sleep of the nightgowns and pyjamas” belonging to the family and discovering, “lost in their folds, the coiled, repressed energy of the most tender pubic hair.”
In “A Cup of Rage,” the unnamed narrator is a reclusive farmer living in the Brazilian backlands. One morning, he receives a visit from his lover, a journalist. The two spend the morning having sex in the farmhouse, then taking a bath together. Almost no words are exchanged. Then, while getting ready for breakfast, the farmer, stepping out to smoke a cigarette, glimpses a colony of ants destroying the farm’s hedge. There is a sudden mood shift, and the couple begins an argument—or, more precisely, the exchange of a series of rants—that gains in intensity as the story progresses. The reader’s impression of the farmer is of someone with experience of the world who has not liked what he’s seen. Nassar wrote the first draft over two feverish weeks in 1970, he told me. “I couldn’t stop laughing,” he said, comparing this to the way he felt while writing “Ancient Tillage.”
Several times, as we ate lunch—chicken pie and rice, wine, passion-fruit mousse—Nassar would interrupt the conversation. “That was real,” he would say, about a certain character or passage; or, about an event in his life, “that’s in the book.” It was a strange and endearing habit, one that showed a disregard for the literary world’s affectations. Reading both novels now, it's hard not to notice the way botanical imagery and nature metaphors intrude on the prose, like biographical details from the future. Feet are moist, “as if pulled out of the earth that very minute”; slumber is ripe, “gathered with the religious voluptuousness of gathered fruit”; the family’s weight on the narrator’s consciousness is like “a rush of heavy water.”
Nassar said that farming had always been his main occupation, whereas writing had “just been another activity.” But his life in agriculture did not begin smoothly. “It was very hard. The property was in a bad state. First we started to plant beans, these wonderful beans,” he said. “We got some other farmers in the region over, and they gave us some pointers on how to do it.” Commodity prices were low at the time, and even with outside help he couldn’t manage to turn a profit. An attempt to raise cattle was abandoned. “For the first six years, we got killed; there were only losses.” Nassar, I noticed, often used the first-person plural when discussing his farming, even though he has mostly lived alone; he preferred not to discuss his one long-term relationship, which he described as “turbulent.” Like his characters, he appears to have found solace in manual labor. “My life now is about doing, doing, doing,” he told an interviewer, in 1996, when asked how he was faring after his literary retirement.
It was in 1991 that his luck with the farm began to turn. It was also during this time that Nassar’s books, which had received critical acclaim but hadn’t reached a wide audience, started to sell in larger numbers. (In 1997, “A Cup of Rage” was made into a feature film; there was an adaptation of “Ancient Tillage” in 2001). Shortly before he donated the Lagoa do Sino farm to UFSCAR, in 2011, he received an offer of eighteen million reais—roughly six million dollars—for the property.
One of Nassar’s fears is that the new Brazilian government could privatize the land he has left to the public. He is deeply critical of Michel Temer, the country’s new right-wing president, and, last April, made a rare public appearance at a rally alongside the former President Dilma Rousseff, shortly before she was impeached. The photo of the reclusive writer hugging the embattled President quickly spread. Nassar almost never makes public appearances, often rejecting invitations even to minor events, but he said he felt the need last year. “I have no doubt we’re going through a coup,” he said. “You can’t just remove a President who won the popular vote democratically.”
During our time together, Nassar sometimes showed pride in his work, but then seemed to chastise himself. At one point, he took a phone call from a publisher in which I heard him argue strenuously about a front cover; he objected to the font size used for his name, which took up most of the cover. Those closest to Nassar describe him as an affable micromanager, a writer who intervenes in every aspect of the editorial process. Schwarcz first edited Nassar in the eighties, before founding Companhia das Letras. “At each new edition, he’d want to change a sentence, or change the author’s bio, or he’d complain about the ink’s tonality,” he said. Sometimes Nassar would ask for a specific kind of font or spacing between the lines. “Sometimes Luiz would say to me, ‘Raduan, with you, when you send me back your notes, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry,’ ” Nassar told me. “I never cared much about sales, but I always wanted the books to be the best they could be. I can’t stand those tiny editions where everything is crammed in tight spaces.”
Nassar’s initial claim that he had no unpublished writing for Schwarcz turned out not to be entirely true. “Menina a Caminho,” a short story written in the late fifties, was eventually handed over and published, in 1997, almost forty years after it was completed. Franceschi is the only person to have convinced Nassar to undertake a literary assignment since his official retirement. The short essay he wrote, “Mãozinhas de Seda,” an oblique reflection on the value of diplomatic instincts, was commissioned in the early nineties for the magazine that Franceschi was editing at the time, but, at Nassar’s request, was not published for seven years.
Both Schwarcz and Franceschi believe that Nassar’s decision to quit came not from a waning of interest but from literary perfectionism. “He’s a guy who devotes himself so much to the craft that I think it’s hard for him to feel rewarded,” Schwarcz said. “Particularly in a country where criticism isn’t so active.” Franceschi is equally admiring of Nassar, but sees some “neurosis” in his behavior. For him, Nassar is someone who “squeezes too hard the parts of himself he doesn’t like,” struggling to reconcile the demands of his ego with his yearning for a humble life.
This restlessness takes shape in his novels as a kind of linguistic anxiety or nervous search for accuracy. One image follows another, as if there were always the need for a richer simile. This trait gives Nassar’s very short books a strangely maximalist feel. “I rarely used to cut stuff,” he told me. “It was usually more about inserting.” But the excess also conveys a sense of insufficiency. In “A Cup of Rage,” as the characters rant at each other in beautiful ways, one senses an underlying cynicism: look at all these powerful metaphors and alliterations, how convincing they can be! The narrators occasionally state their helplessness. “What was the point of talking further”? André says at one point. In both novels, the characters’ seemingly endless expounding ends in acts of violence.
Before we met, I had written a review of Nassar’s work in which I put forth this interpretation; he sent me a kind, slightly formal e-mail praising the “suitability of the statements.” But when we returned to the subject later, he demurred. In the past, Nassar has occasionally shown irritability at the theorizing around his decision to stop writing. In a 1997 interview with the local magazine Veja, he listed several activities he had quit: a languages major at university, law, rabbit-breeding, journalism. “All of that gave me the label of being fickle,” he told the interviewer. “Why is it that only when I abandoned literature I suddenly became this fascinating character? Isn’t it weird?”
One morning last December, I visited him again at home. He was wearing an ironed, pin-striped shirt and an old wristwatch, and, with his usual unostentatious cordiality, had set the table with bread, cheese, and a thermos of coffee. On previous meetings, I had hesitated to ask the obvious question—Why did you stop writing?—telling myself that it was a strategy to make him feel at ease. But, that afternoon, there was a lull. He frowned, and his expression darkened a little in what I first read as anger, but which gradually revealed itself as an effort to contemplate the question with care. For a while, we sat across each other in silence. Then he glanced away and said, “Who knows? I really don’t know.”
Alejandro Chacoff is a writer living in Rio de Janeiro, and a staff writer at piauí magazine.
Raduan Nassar was born in 1935 in Pindorama, in the state of São Paolo, Brazil. A Cup of Rage and Ancient Tillage are his two major literary works. Raised in a Lebanese immigrant family, Nassar attended law school at the University of São Paolo and was a journalist and editor for the newspaper Jornal de Bairro. Although hailed around the world as a major writer, Nassar has led a private existence since 1985, dedicated to farming and livestock production.
Raduan Nassar was born in 1935, in Pindorama, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. He was raised mainly in small rural towns, then went on to study Law at the University of São Paulo. Like his Lebanese immigrant family, the author's life has been bound in agriculture and writing. Ancient Tillage (1975) and A Cup of Rage (1978), a novella, are his two major literary works. He also worked as a journalist and editor for the newspaper Jornal do Bairro, jointly founded with his brothers. Although an acclaimed literary author, since 1985 Raduan Nassar has led a private existence dedicated to farming and livestock production. He retired to a smaller farm in 2011, having donated his entire commercial property to the agricultural departments of the Federal University of São Carlos for the creation of a new campus.
Raduan Nassar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Raduan in 2016.
Raduan Nassar (born November 27, 1935, in Pindorama, São Paulo state) is a Brazilian writer. The son of Lebanese immigrants, he moved to São Paulo when he was a teenager. He studied Law and Philosophy at one of the most important universities in Brazil, the University of São Paulo. In 1970, he wrote Um Copo de Cólera, published in 1978. His literary debut was in 1975, when Lavoura Arcaica was released. The Brazilian cinema adapted both of his books (see the article Lavoura Arcaica (To the left of the father)). In 1997, Menina a Caminho, a book of short stories written during the 1960s and 70s, was released.
Despite great critical acclaim, Nassar retired from writing in 1984, claiming he had lost interest in literature and wanted to work with agriculture instead.[1] As a landowner, Nassar dedicated himself to commercial farming until 2011, when he donated the entire farm to the Federal University of São Carlos, on the condition that it should become a new campus. He has also donated much of his real estate and invested in local charity, retiring then to a small farm.[2]
In 2016, Nassar was acclaimed the winner of the 2016 Camões Prize,[3] the most prestigious award of the Portuguese language literature.
English translations
Nassar, Raduan (7 January 2016) [First published 1975 in Brazilian Portuguese as Lavoura Arcaica]. Ancient Tillage. Translated by Sotelino, Karen. Penguin Classics. ISBN 978-0141396781.
Nassar, Raduan (7 January 2016) [First published 1978 in Brazilian Portuguese as Um copo de cólera]. A Cup of Rage. Translated by Tobler, Stefan. Penguin Classics. ISBN 978-0141396804.
Reviewing A Cup of Rage in British daily newspaper The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard found it to be "a burning coal of a work", adding, "You may consider a book this short to be scarcely worthy of the name, but it packs more power into its scant 47 pages than most books do into five or 10 times as many. Each of its seven chapters comes not only as an unbroken paragraph but as a single sentence: you have to read carefully to keep track, and once you have finished you will want to read it again. The writing is chewy – dense, tough, but well worth the effort".[4]
Raduan Nassar was born in 1935 in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Like his Lebanese immigrant family, the author’s life has been bound in agriculture and writing. Ancient Tillage (1975) and A Cup of Rage (1978) are his two major literary works. He was raised mainly in rural towns, then went on to study Law at the University of Sao Paulo. He also worked as a journalist. Although an acclaimed literary author, since 1985 Raduan Nassar has led a private existence dedicated to farming and livestock production.
Agent Name: Laurence Laluyaux
Nassar, Raduan: A CUP OF RAGE
(Nov. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Nassar, Raduan A CUP OF RAGE New Directions (Adult Fiction) $10.95 1, 31 ISBN: 978-0-8112-2658-5
An affair goes sour and carnality turns to violence in reclusive Brazilian writer Nassar's (barely) novella.Our narrator is a well-to-do farmer, a stranger to himself. His paramour is a writer from the city, and she is a stranger to him as well--at least, as Nassar writes, "For a few moments in the room we seemed to be two strangers observed by somebody, and that somebody was always her and me." We readers are the ones doing the observing, and it's not pretty: the man turns fretful almost at once, his attention diverted by the fact that leafcutter ants have gnawed a hole in his hedge; the woman, much younger, wants the attention on her, but she is thinly contemptuous. Their heated contact turns physical in all the wrong ways; in just four dozen pages, Nassar charts the ugly implosion of a once-passionate affair. But more than that, he metaphorically recapitulates events in Brazil's history, for this book was first published in 1978, when the nation was slowly emerging from a dark military dictatorship; when the young woman calls the man a fascist, she is not being hyperbolic, and when he admits that she's not wrong, he conjures up a whole set of associations that may not be meaningful to readers outside that specifically Brazilian experience. Still, his numerous quirks and phobias--including frequent allusions to castration and his not-unfounded certainty that the insects are coming to devour him as well--require no translation. Nassar is a modernist par excellence, his onrushing style reminiscent at times of Beckett; each of the brief chapters here is made up of just a sentence or two that run for pages at a time, capturing the breathlessness of lust and rage. Vivid, immediate, and mostly unpleasant. Readers new to Nassar may want to begin with his simultaneously released novel Ancient Tillage, which is less experimental though just as cynical.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Nassar, Raduan: A CUP OF RAGE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865734&it=r&asid=1d9296ac4e1f2efdfc302c454daef24b. Accessed 3 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865734
Nassar, Raduan: ANCIENT TILLAGE
(Nov. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Nassar, Raduan ANCIENT TILLAGE New Directions (Adult Fiction) $13.95 1, 31 ISBN: 978-0-8112-2656-1
A prodigal son's homecoming gives ample reason to think that everyone might have been better off if he'd just stayed away.Brazilian writer Nassar is being rediscovered in his own country, where, though never quite forgotten, he fell into near silence for 40 years following the publication of this novel and its companion novella, A Cup of Rage. During that time, he retreated to the countryside, where he grew up and took to farming. In this slender story, young Andre has followed much the same course, having tired of his father's sternly pious ways and gone off to the big city to try to make a life there. It didn't work: "The happiness I had imagined existed beyond our father's realm was no more than an illusion." Andre is a study in torment, and what torments him the most is a decidedly unhealthy attachment to his sister, Ana: "Ana was my illness, she was my insanity, my air, my splinter and chill, my breath, the impertinent insistence in my testicles." Well, now. When he is not warding off thoughts of Ana, he is out in the sheepfolds and livestock pens, carefully eyeing the "smug nanny-goat" or trying to dissuade his siblings from taking his example and heading off to the metropolis themselves; confesses one to Andre, perhaps improbably, "I want to be known in the brothels and in the alleys where tramps sleep, I want to do lots of different things, be generous with my own body...." Ah, but that way trouble lies. Nassar's story has all the gloominess of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, and it's just as packed with allusion to classical mythology and literature, as when, in closing, Andre's mother cries out "an ancient lament that to this day can still be heard along the poor Mediterranean coast" even if it issues from the Brazilian rain forest. Nassar is tremendously adept at capturing the existential anguish of a troubled mind. It's not easy or uplifting reading, but his dark view of the world commands attention.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Nassar, Raduan: ANCIENT TILLAGE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865803&it=r&asid=8dcf36c4f1e29341183178d70b9a696d. Accessed 3 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865803
Ancient Tillage
263.45 (Nov. 7, 2016): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Ancient Tillage
Raduan Nassar, trans. from the Portuguese by
K.C.S. Sotelino. New Directions, $13.95 trade
paper (144p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2656-1
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
This slim, intensely powerful novel portrays the coming-of-age of a young man named Andre who grew up on his family's farm in Brazil but has now fled to an unnamed city in an act of rebellion against his domineering, extremely religious, and constantly sermonizing father. Andre is also running from feelings for his sister, Ana, illicit desires that he expresses with agonized passion in an almost phantasmagoric scene alone with Ana in the family's chapel. Numbing his agony with the help of generous amounts of wine, Andre languishes in a boarding house until his brother, Pedro, comes to bring him home. In prose tonally reminiscent of scripture, the novel explores the interior life of a character on the brink of an emotional and sexual awakening set against the tragic portrayal of a family on the verge of disintegration. Newly translated from a text originally published in 197 5, this is an essential and unflinching work that combines torment and desire to arrive at an explosive examination of ancestry and the world we inherit. The novel's conclusion, taking place at a homecoming party for Andre, is breathtaking in its almost mythological expansiveness. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ancient Tillage." Publishers Weekly, 7 Nov. 2016, p. 36. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469757463&it=r&asid=97739659507fb75e7c5df1e734de109a. Accessed 3 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469757463
A Cup of Rage
263.40 (Oct. 3, 2016): p94.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
A Cup of Rage
Raduan Nassar, trans. from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler, New Directions, $10.95 trade paper (64p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2658-5
This erotically charged story of one day in the life of a man and his younger female lover, which takes place at the man's house in the Brazilian countryside, is a slim but explosive examination of power and violence in human relationships. The novella, first published in Brazil in the 1970s, has been exquisitely translated by Tobler. The densely complex prose belies the rather simple story of an intimate sexual encounter between a man and woman followed by a destructive argument the following morning, spurred on by the man's fury at the discovery of a gap in his hedge that had been created overnight by leaf-cutter ants. Both lovers hurl insults at the other, and the man becomes increasingly enraged as his lover taunts him, knowing exactly how to bring out his dangerous passion. The threat of violence and its inevitability is embedded in almost every moment between the characters as their power struggle plays out, and much of the novella's force comes from the implied relationship between violence and desire, pain and pleasure. The impeccably intricate structure--each chapter is told in a single sprawling sentence--and the intense style lend a great deal of intellectual weight to this powerful, challenging work. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Cup of Rage." Publishers Weekly, 3 Oct. 2016, p. 94. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466166559&it=r&asid=feacede11e7a19132683ad0581392f92. Accessed 3 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466166559
A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar review – from lust to rage to howling despair
If this country were grown-up enough to have a literary Good Sex award, this explosively erotic story from the Brazilian modernist would be a strong contender
Raduan Nassar.
Each chapter is a single sentence … Raduan Nassar.
Shares
1,022
Comments
4
Nicholas Lezard
Tuesday 12 January 2016 09.00 GMT
Last modified on Friday 5 May 2017 18.07 BST
No, I hadn’t heard of him, and unless you are up on modernist Brazilian literature you probably won’t have either. This, along with the novel Ancient Tillage, also published in Penguin Modern Classics, is the first time Raduan Nassar has been translated into English, in this country at least.
A Cup of Rage is a burning coal of a work, superbly translated by Stefan Tobler. You may consider a book this short to be scarcely worthy of the name, but it packs more power into its scant 47 pages than most books do into five or 10 times as many. Each of its seven chapters comes not only as an unbroken paragraph but as a single sentence: you have to read carefully to keep track, and once you have finished you will want to read it again. The writing is chewy – dense, tough, but well worth the effort.
Sign up for the Bookmarks email
Read more
In bald paraphrase, the plot seems almost bathetic. A man, living in the countryside, has a younger female lover. They have sex; they get up early and shower; he sees that leaf-cutter ants have carved a gap into his privet hedge, which makes him furious; then they have a massive and quite extraordinary argument, and she drives off.
That is the storyline, stripped to its bones. How it is told, though, is another matter entirely. Apart from the last page, everything we read is the internal thought process of the man, working from lust to rage to howling despair: an iron-hard jet of fury, as the style dictates, and reminiscent of the Austrian master of vituperative, Thomas Bernhard. Nassar had a small literary output of just two books, but he was also a successful journalist and editor. He is classified as a modernist writer, but you might wonder whether it was his form that suggested the subject matter or the other way round. Whichever, this is all great, lacerating stuff, as any honest portrayal of a purely sexually based relationship should be.
I remember reading in Gillian Rose’s excellent Love’s Work that “there is no democracy in love relationships”, and the book bears that out fully – but not in the way you might expect. The man is a tyrant, a bully, given to histrionic rhetoric (“Hadn’t I told her a hundred times that pious prostration and the erection of a saint are mutually dependent?” etc. Incidentally, I wonder if there is a pun in that “erection” in the original Portuguese, as there is, faintly, in English). She, on the other hand, stands no nonsense, and teases him with a mixture of laughing disdain and erotic taunting that only drives him to further rage.
Advertisement
It is, in fact, incredibly sexy. An “erotic cult novel” claims the blurb on the back, and that is, if you will excuse the phrase, bang on. The sex at the beginning is steamy, and all the better for there not being a single lazy verbal shortcut to eroticism in it. If this country was grown-up enough to have a literary “Good Sex Award” instead of its sniggering opposite, this would be a strong contender. And sex hovers around, like the atmosphere in a closed room after the act, for the rest of the book: “and when I felt her little hand trembling as it slid under my shirt, become a finch that has flown from a nearby thicket to nest in my chest hairs ...” Well, if that doesn’t start doing it for you, then that’s a shame.
There is more to the book than sex, though. I should say: “even more”. It was published in 1978, when Brazil was still under, but beginning to crawl out from, a military dictatorship; political allusions in the couple’s argument remind you of this. There is a power relationship at work between the man and woman: control and resistance. That the man ends up slapping the woman should come as no surprise. It is impossible to imagine the story without a moment of violence, and it results in his utter downfall, as is right. Give this book to your lover – and stand well back.
• To order A Cup of Rage for £4.79 (RRP £5.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Ancient Tillage
by Raduan Nassar, trans. by K.C.S. Sotelino
FacebookTwitter
Raduan Nassar's Ancient Tillage, newly translated by K.C.S. Sotelino, offers a Dionysian rush of lyricism, a drunken dance of description and imagery that opens the darkest doors of human desire. First published in Brazil in 1975, this short yet emotionally intense novel is divided into 30 chapters, ranging in length from a few pages to brief single paragraphs. The tragic tale of a farmer family in dissolution is revealed through the point of view of André, the family's adolescent son, who is torn between a father's piety and his own indulgent desire for his sister, Ana. His transgressive sexuality and poetic sensibilities become a potent, anarchic force undermining patriarchal order.
In this way, Ancient Tillage extends the dark romantic individualism of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; it presents the individual mind as bold destroyer of hierarchy but also, in turn, as a passive receptacle, fatally sensitive and eternally haunted by images and desires. That such self-indulgence leads to familial strife and tragedy, as in Goethe's novels, is not surprising. But unlike his European predecessors, Nassar (A Cup of Rage) hews an earthy, sensual expressionism more reminiscent of Latin American poets like Pablo Neruda. The novel brims with lavish images and symbols of nature, such as "the damp, silent blue breeze that soars like a scarf over the atmosphere at the same time every day." Nassar's sentences flow in sinuous, mesmerizing waves, educing "destiny's baroque geometry" and the "bright dust" of creation. Deeply stirring and unforgettable, Ancient Tillage is nothing short of a literary masterpiece. --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist and fiction author
Discover: This English translation of a classic Brazilian novel offers a dizzying and disturbing experience of the lyrical self.
A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar
Review by Ciat Conlin — Published on December 12, 2016
Published in Issue 46
A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar (tr. Stefan Tobler). New Directions. $11.95, 80pp.
Raduan Nassar’s A Cup of Rage has been a cult classic in Brazil since its publication in the late 1970s, but was not published in English until last year. From the first page, which opens in media res, it is apparent why Nassar has achieved such renown in his homeland, despite only publishing two novels before retreating from public life: his prose moves with a violence, vitality, and sexual energy that burns like a splash of acid. At only 45 pages, it barely meets the expectations of “novel,” yet the experience and reward of reading it are equal to that of a much longer fiction. Constructed of seven one-sentence chapters and anchored by a vitriolic, brutal center-piece, A Cup of Rage is a book to be read in the span of a single sitting—even if its density conspires against that.
The novel takes place on a farm somewhere in the Brazilian outback in the late years of the military dictatorship that had ruled the country since the early ’60s. Its principal characters—a middle-aged farmer and his young lover, who is an idealistic journalist—remain unnamed, save for the rapid barrage of invectives they heave at each other. But we have no premonition of this dark turn at the novel’s beginning. The arrival of the journalist at the narrator’s farm takes up barely the space of the page, immediately thrusting us into an electric bedroom scene:
I closed my hand over hers and straightened out her fingers, instilling courage in them, guiding them under my control to the hair on my chest, until they, from the example of my fingers under the sheet, developed their own masterful clandestine activities, or at a more advanced stage, after having carefully pored over our hairs, swellings and many smells, when the two of us on our knees measured the longest path for a single kiss, the palms of our hands pressed together, our arms open in an almost Christian exercise.
The narrator assumes the role of a priest, performing a ceremony over the body of the journalist. He describes the act as a “ritual,” in which he “would repeatedly enlist God’s name in my obscenities,” and this encounter is the closest the novel ever comes to Christianity—and yet it is a Christianity void of belief. Sex provides the only true escape possible for Nassar’s characters, from their lives, society, and each other, and they appear to repeat the pattern again and again, even if this is the novel’s only “real” sex scene.
But if A Cup of Rage is concerned with desire, it is just as preoccupied, if not more so, with rage. After a languorous breakfast, the narrator steps away to the veranda for a cigarette and spots a gap in his hedge, the work of leaf-cutter ants:
A gap in my hedge, oh misery, I press my finger into the ashtray, get burnt, uncomprehending she asked me ‘what is it?’, but without replying I half threw myself, half tripped myself down the stairs (Bingo was already on the patio, waiting for me, electrified) and she followed me, almost screaming ‘but what is it?”, and Dona Mariana had come running from the kitchen with the commotion, her eyes wide behind her thick lenses, dumbstruck at the top of the stairs, a pot and cloth in her hands, but I didn’t see anything, I left the two of them behind and hurtled over, out of my mind, and when I got close I couldn’t bear what I saw ‘fucking leaf-cutter ants,” and then I screamed even more loudly ‘bloody fucking leaf-cutter fucking ants’
All of a sudden, the slow, aching opening chapters give way to an explosion of tensions. This effect arises not just from the novel’s structure as a continuous sentence, but from the activity Nassar conveys, as characters run, trip, follow, hurtle, and scream from one page to the next, all without a single full stop. The motion is made as the narrator runs past his lover and Dona, the maid, while uttering a stream of obscenities. These imprecations are critical to the chapter’s, but also the novel’s, dialogue, and it doesn’t take long for the protagonist to redirect them from the ants to the young journalist. He rages at her as “an emancipated chit,” “a shitty little journalist,” a “bitch,” a “whore,” a “fraud.” She snarls back, tearing into him as a “little boy,” a “scummy iconoclast,” an “old fascist,” and, most memorably, “degenerate cum.” The hedge and ants are soon forgotten as their fighting takes an increasingly political turn (even from the start this is apparent in her constant admonitions of his alleged “fascism”), though by his own words he seems less a fascist than a disillusioned former idealist who has lapsed into nihilism:
I was repelled when I wanted to take part, let the world go to the dogs now! let cities fall, let people suffer, let life and freedom perish, when the ivory king’s under threat, who cares about the flesh and blood of sisters and mothers and children…people are only, and always will be, a ruled mass…because the shitty strong arm of authority is necessarily the basis of all ‘order’
This is a sharp contrast to the activist-bent of his lover, who continues to assault him as a deluded reactionary—a mantle he all too readily accepts. His ripostes take an increasingly misogynistic, macho turn (he at one point declaring “I’ve got balls, fraud, I don’t need higher power”), as the scene sinks further and further into a morass of bitter insults. Neither the narrator nor the journalist seems to have a firm grasp upon their political positions, or their social positions. His critique that upper-middle class revolutionaries like her, “dressed up as the people, generally look to me like carnival trannies” is, while crude, not an unconvincing criticism of her populist fury. But his own posturing as a “true” member of the people, a “graduate odd-job man,” doesn’t hold up either; he’s an apparently well-off landowner, with a large house and several servants. The closest we get to the actual “people” who form the backdrop of his and her political discourse are the much-abused Dona Mariana and Antonio, who themselves rarely step out of the novel’s backdrop. The real “people” and their plight are scarcely given a second thought by the novel’s erstwhile populists.
If anything, their political posturing seems like nothing more than a performance. This undercurrent comes to the surface when he slaps her across the face, then again, bringing her “almost to the point of orgasm.” “Types like you drool for the boot, types like you drool for a foot,” he tells her, and it’s not clear if he’s referring to an individual’s desire for domination, or that of an entire social group. In the bedroom, the journalist allows herself to be crushed, humiliated, and defeated by the “fascists” she spends her life fighting against. When she tells him “yes bastard, you’re the one I love,” she could just as well be speaking to the military regime. Her retreat to his compound in the outback, far from the political struggles of her real life, allows herself to find release in a ceasing of her resistance. And it is difficult to shake the feeling as a reader than we are just watching an extended sexual performance, each vile insult a last gasp before orgasm, anger and hatred exciting them just as much as physical desire.
Perhaps this ambiguity is fitting for the novel; it ends almost as it begins, with her return to his farm, and by the novel’s close we scarcely know more about the true lives of its characters than we did at its start. The man and the woman remain unnamed, and ever-shifting in their relationships to each other, at one moment mother and son, another tyrant and subject, peasant and intellectual, lover and lover. Like Nassar’s surging, unceasing prose, their transformation keeps us perpetually off balance, never quite sure of what is real and what is yet another torrid fantasy.
Ciat Conlin is a comparative literature major at the American University of Paris’