Contemporary Authors

Fernanda Torres was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1965. She is an actress and writer. She has enjoyed a successful career in the theatre, cinema and on television for thirty-five years and has received many awards, including Best Actress at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. She is a columnist for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo and the magazine Veja-Rio and contributes to the magazine Piauí. The End is her first novel.

Fernanda Torres was born in 1965 in Rio de Janeiro. The daughter of actors, she was raised backstage. Fernanda has built a solid career as an actress and dedicated herself equally to film, theater, and TV since she was 13 years old, and has received many awards, including Best Actress at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. Over the last twenty years, she has written and collaborated on film scripts and adaptations for theater. She began to write regularly for newspapers and magazines in 2007 and is now a columnist for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo and the magazine Veja-Rio and contributes to the magazine Piauí. Her debut novel, The End, has sold more than 200,000 copies in Brazil.

Fernanda Torres
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fernanda Torres
Fernanda Torres cropped 2.jpg
Fernanda Torres in 2012.
Born Fernanda Pinheiro Monteiro Torres
September 15, 1965 (age 52)[1]
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Spouse(s) Gerald Thomas
Andrucha Waddington
Parent(s) Fernando Torres
Fernanda Montenegro
Awards Best Actress Award (Cannes Film Festival)
1986 Love Me Forever or Never
Fernanda Pinheiro Monteiro Torres[1] (born September 15, 1965) is a Brazilian movie, theatre and television actress. She was born in Rio de Janeiro, the daughter of the Oscar-nominated actress Fernanda Montenegro and the actor Fernando Torres.

In May 1986, she received the Best Actress Award at Cannes Festival for Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar at the age of 20.[2]

She is married to movie producer and director Andrucha Waddington, who directed her and her mother in the 2005 film The House of Sand. They have two sons together, Joaquim (b. 2000) and Antônio (born on April 10, 2008). She is also the stepmother of João (b. 1993) and Pedro (b. 1995).

In 2003, she wrote her first script (O Redentor, 2004), with her brother's assistance, cinematographer Cláudio Torres.

Contents [hide]
1 Selected filmography
2 Awards and nominations
3 References
4 External links
Selected filmography[edit]
Inocência (1983)
A Marvada Carne (1985)
Com Licença, Eu Vou à Luta (1986)
Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar (1986)
A Mulher do Próximo (1988)
Kuarup (1989)
Beijo 2348/72 (1990)
One Man's War (1991)
Capitalismo Selvagem (1993)
Foreign Land (1996)
O Judeu (1996)
Four Days in September (1997)
Traição (1998)
Gêmeas (1999)
Os Normais (2003)
Redentor (2004)
The House of Sand (2005)
Saneamento Básico (2007)
A Mulher Invisível (2009)
Os Normais 2, A Noite Mais Maluca De Todas (2009)

Born in Rio de Janeiro, Fernanda Torres has been an actress in film, theater, and TV and the author of the End which has sold more than 200,000 copies in Brazil. She has won many awards, including Best Actress at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. Over the last 20 years, she’s become a scriptwriter for film and theater and a regular newspaper and magazine columnist.

Fernanda Torres, author of The End, talks to Camilla Orr, host of Changing Hands Bookstore's Found in Translation Book Club
AUTHOR PHOTO
BOOK COVER Fernanda Torres was born in 1965 in Rio de Janeiro. The daughter of actors, she was raised backstage. Fernanda has built a solid career as an actress and dedicated herself equally to film, theater, and TV since she was 13 years old, and has received many awards, including Best Actress at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. Over the last twenty years, she has written and collaborated on film scripts and adaptations for theater. She began to write regularly for newspapers and magazines in 2007 and is now a columnist for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo and the magazine Veja-Rio and contributes to the magazine Piauí. Her debut novel, The End, has sold more than 200,000 copies in Brazil.

CO: Though you've written newspaper columns and movie scripts, The End is your first novel. Did you find writing fiction came easily after years of getting into the minds of other through acting?

FT: Literature was something different, almost sacred and far from the work I had developed in newspapers, magazines, or movie scripts. I've never dared facing a novel. It happened because of an invitation by Fernando Meirelles, the director of City of God, who was developing a TV series about aging, and asked some writers to create a short story that would be adapted, later, for television. I thought that the ultimate moment of aging would be the last five minutes of life, and decided to describe the last thoughts of an old man right before he was run over by a car. The series never got through, but the first chapter of The End, the death of Álvaro, was there, written. Álvaro had four friends, and I thought I could kill them all, in the same manner I had done with him, describing their final moments on earth. I showed the chapter to Cia das Letras, my publishing company, and we started to work together in the book. At first I thought it would be a novel based only in the five dying voices, but Luiz Schwarcz, the editor, insisted in the idea of the third person, a narrator, and that's how the chapters about the wives and children came to be, filling the spaces between the male voices.

It all happened in a very organic, consistent process, similar of the one I always had, as an actress, in theater, with the editors assuming the place of the directors, discussing the material I was presenting to them. Acting helps you to be in character. The practice of imagining yourself under the skin of someone else was not strange for me. In a way, writing is everything an actor thinks in between the lines. It's the inner voice, is the flow of consciousness, something you practice a lot, especially on stage.

Tell me about writing male characters. Each of your protagonists is entirely believable as a very flawed macho man. What was it like being inside them, embodying their sexual urges and selfish actions?

It was a bit like a possession. Every time I had to abandon a character, I felt insecure, and doubt if the next one would become as real as the one I left. But they all came through, acting almost by themselves, deciding what to do, and where to go. Neto, for instance, scared me a lot. To face what a faithful husband, middle class black man, would do or feel, was quite a challenge for me. But Ruth, the ideal woman, was as tough as him. So, I think the difficulty of creating believable characters doesn't depend on genre, or age. Some of them trigger your imagination more easily them others. I had a great time inventing the vicious Silvio, and the impotent Alvaro. The male characters helped me to be away from myself, to write fiction, and not confession. It liberated my writing.

During the seventies, when I was still a child, I knew a lot of men, friends of my parents, who were very similar to those I create. Macho men, mostly artists, refined men, different from my characters, but who had some relation with them. Perhaps, the impact of coexisting with this generation of machos, the last machos on earth, before aids, before the new feminism, before the world as we know today, impressed me and served as a good material to the novel.

Rio plays heavily in the novel—it almost feels like a character itself. Would the setting work in a different part of Brazil, or is The End essentially a story of Rio?

It's a universal carioca story, where the city has a central role, almost like a character. It starts with the idyllic Rio, during the time of Bossa Nova, when the city had the perfect mélange of romanticism, cosmopolitanism, music, geography, and cultural life; and it ends up in the nowadays Rio, with its social tragedy, its frenzied streets, where old buses spread black smoke in the air, and ex-bodybuilders take high doses of Viagra to join strippers in the night clubs. The city and the characters decay together with their surroundings. And the hedonism of Rio, the beach culture, the way nature acts on its citizens, is the flavor of my drama.

There's definitely some toxic masculinity going on in this novel. Most of the reminiscing happens over events that took place 50-60 years ago. Does Brazil, and Rio specifically, still have a problem with macho men and toxic masculinity?

The book takes place mostly in the '60s and '70s. All the men and women in it are normal average people, part of a generation who was raised believing that love, marriage and children would fulfill them to the rest of their lives. But the behavior revolution of the '70s came along to shake their existences. It happened only in the '70s in Brazil. Drugs, divorce, sexual liberation, it buried the Bossa Nova ideal. My men are the last machos of Rio. They remind me of the couple of On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, the last virgin couple. And have, also, some relativeness with the characters of Ettore Scola's movie, Brutti, Sporchi I Cattivi. They are incorrect latins, old machos, totally awkward and condemnable to nowadays moral.

But more than the macho mentality, I wanted to write about middle class carioca people. People with no heroic tendencies, or altruism, no art skills or revolutionary will. Common men who never fought against dictatorship, who were not leftists or right wing. Hedonists, middle class hedonists, strange fruits from Copacabana beach. Men who would die anonymously. Death is the only great event that will give them some dignity.

Feminism is a big issue in Brazil today, as in the rest of the world. The violence against women is very high in Brazil, homophobia. But the book is about a whole generation, not only men, and the raise of new mentalities. You have the young hippie, Suzana, whose sexual freedom fascinates Silvio, the vicious. You have Irene, who, in her youth, suffers for not finding the perfect love, but ages well, cured from the '60s fantasy, of finding the perfect match. The male characters are the central core of the book, but there is a lot of change in the female half.

The End sold over 200,000 copies in Brazil. While the novel recaps events taking place in the 1950s and 1960s, the toxic masculinity that makes the male characters so unredeemable is still a problem, today, in the United States. What has the reaction to the English translation been so far? Do you think the issues of aging, male sexuality, and misogyny will resonate across cultures?

The book had a very good reception in the US, so far. But it is only in the beginning. Yes, I think it can resonate across cultures. You can't define society, any society, with just one line, or color. You had Obama and Michelle, it looked like the States had moved forward, and suddenly, there is Trump. What is America, Trump or Obama? Probably both. The book was sold to many countries, and they all seem to have comprehended the characters in a universal way. Death, aging, loneliness, friendship, love, separation, grief, these are the subjects of the book. I has a fine humor, I think, tragic humor. There is, of course, a local touch, which is good, because it makes you travel in time and space, makes you experiment another culture, diversity, but the inner feeling, the big issue of the book, life and death, men and women singularities, are quite universal.

Do you have a favorite character? If so, why?

Álvaro, Silvio, Suzana. Álvaro for been the first one, and for having such a black sense of humor. I enjoyed creating his egoistic impotent profile, that doesn't try to safe water while brushing his teeth, or don't give a shit to global warming, because he will be dead before the Arctic disappears. Silvio for been so crazy, vicious, for dying in carnival and been so incorrect. Suzana, I adore Suzana. She was based on Baby Consuelo, an amazing Brazilian singer, who was part of Novos Baianos, a genial iconic band from the '70s, that we all still listen to. They all lived in the same house, like a community, Baby had six children, Suzana possesses her happiness and freedom, and I like the way she serves as a reverse mirror to the macho guys.

While I had a hard time empathizing with any of the 5 male characters, I needed to keep reading to find out what happened to their wives, lovers, and children. As all of these characters are disposed of or disregarded at some point by the 5 friends, I felt like the message of the novel was that it's not the partying, drugs, sex, or crazy nights that matter, but the people that you surround yourself with and love. What do you make of that interpretation?

I don't know if the book has a message, or if this is the message of the book. I always find interesting the way men get together. It must be something from the Cavemen time, I don't know, the pleasure of hunting with your pals. Men tend to be very self-focused, egoistic and flat. The five men of the book are. And even loving, or caring for their wives and children—not Silvio, Silvio is a pathological case—but the others, there is always a moment where they are able to disconnect, to think only about themselves, only about themselves. I don't know if this is cultural, or not, but, as a woman, especially after having two children, it's very difficult to be apart from what surrounds me. The five guys in the book are hedonist egoistic men, and this is their source of pleasure and damnation.

It this book has a message, it has something to do with death. What do you think you will remember, five seconds before dying? What's the resume of your opera? Did it worth living? Who is next?

One of the most criticized aspects of the novel is that the five friends all die without a chance for redemption. Perhaps it's because I'm a woman, reading through a feminist lens, but I didn't feel like any of the characters deserved redemption, or would even have tried to redeem their actions if given the choice. Indeed, Ciro has a chance to come back to his wife Ruth early on after his first betrayal, and while he does, it doesn't last long. I read that as his opportunity to be a better person, a better man, but he couldn't—or wouldn't—do it. So I found it to be a strength that all the characters end their lives seemingly without regret or redemption, but I'm wondering if the criticism is mostly coming from male readers and critics?

I agree, there is no redemption, and I think it was more uncomfortable for men than for women, this lack of salvation in the book. But a lot of men recognized themselves in it, not totally, but in part; and laughed with it, and felt surprised that those voices could have been written by a woman. And there is a lot of humor in the book. It is a tragic comedy. As an actress, I've always felt attracted by imperfect characters, by their mistakes, that's what creates drama. Ciro grew up to be the perfect men, who could live up to this kind of expectation? Sooner or later, life will challenge you to cross the line of perfection, as he does. And he dies in a very moving way, asking to go, making love with death. I see redemption in that scene. I never wanted to teach a lesson to my characters or my readers, men or women, there is always something tragic about existence: the fact that it comes to an end. There is no redemption, even for Madre Tereza de Calcutá.

What's been the most surprising thing about the reception of The End?

The fact that I wrote it is the most surprising thing for me. And the fact that it was popular and translated into other languages. This book was quite a surprise for me—being close to 50 years old when it was published, I was not expecting any big change!

Do you think you'll write more fiction? Are you working on anything?

I'm writing another book now. I've reached the second third of it. Let's see how it goes.

The End
Fernanda Torres, trans. from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin. Restless, $16.99 ISBN 978-1-63206-121-8

The intense but tenuous bonds of male friendship give shape and structure to this energetic, impressive debut from acclaimed Brazilian actress Torres. Set against the vivid backdrop of Copacabana, the episodic novel follows five contentious and devoted friends—Ciro, Silvio, Neto, Alvaro, and Ribeiro—from the hedonistic nights of their youth to the humbling days of old age. Beginning with the violent death of Alvaro, the group’s last surviving member, the story meticulously works it way back through the complicated lives of each friend, culminating with the operatic death of Ciro, who retains a spark of youth until his last moments. Torres paints a sharp, intimate portrait of male sexuality and psychology (including the experience of aging), illuminating the friends’ profound differences (such as between the decadent Silvio and the meeker Ribeiro) while never undermining the believability of their connection. As assured as the characterizations of the central characters are the investigations of the men and women who surround them, the wives who abide their exploits and the priests who speak at their funerals. The narration and momentum remain lively and sharp throughout. (July)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 05/08/2017
Release date: 07/11/2017

THE END
by Fernanda Torres ; translated by Alison Entrekin
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KIRKUS REVIEW
In this harsh first novel by a Brazilian actress, five elderly men reflect on their friendships with each other and their exhaustive love lives.

It gives nothing away to explain that all five—Álvaro, Sílvio, Ribeiro, Neto, Ciro—die; Torres structures her book around each man’s dying narration. Walking home for the last time, in 2014, 85-year-old Álvaro is bitter, misogynistic, and highly critical of his already dead friends. Glad to be done with sex, he recalls the unpleasant half-baked orgy Sílvio held before leaving Rio years earlier. Each man will remember this orgy in a tellingly different way that highlights his character. Lying helpless on a sidewalk at age 66 in 2009, banker Sílvio admits the orgy was a phony farewell. He never really left Rio, merely transferred to a different bank branch to avoid his friends. If Álvaro is a cold fish, Sílvio is a crude, selfish sensualist. Dumping his wife, he carries on an obsessive, tawdry affair with a young bisexual woman who happens to be Ribeiro’s girlfriend. After Sílvio’s death, from Parkinson’s combined with recreational drug use, his son runs an ad apologizing for Sílvio’s years of bad behavior and inviting others to celebrate his death. Ribeiro and Neto are outliers. Rebeiro, who suffers a heart attack after taking Viagra at age 83, is the group’s only bachelor but has always secretly loved Ciro’s wife, Ruth. Half black, Neto has lived under pressures his friends would never understand. A decent man, he dies in 1992, one year after his wife of over 30 years. Everyone admires handsome, intelligent, passionate Ciro, but he commits an unforgivable act of cruelty against Ruth. When Álvaro asks if the fast-growing cancer that strikes 50-year-old Ciro in 1990 is God’s punishment, Ciro implies that he hopes so. So will readers.

The flair and wit of Torres’ writing does not allay the unpleasant aftertaste left by this unforgiving portrait of men at their worst.

Pub Date: July 11th, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63206-121-8
Page count: 208pp
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: April 18th, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1st, 2017

THE END
Fernanda Torres
Alison Entrekin (Translator)
Restless Books (Jul 11, 2017)
Softcover $16.99 (256pp)
978-1-63206-121-8

The End is vivid and irascible as it confronts the reality of aging, regrets, and death.

Famed actress Fernanda Torres’s debut novel, The End, is a brutally unflinching look at the lifelong friendships of five aging male friends and the women in their lives. Set in Rio, the novel travels back and forth through time, following the men’s self-indulgent escapades throughout the city from hole-in-the-wall bars to luxurious penthouses.

Torres’s conceit is that she introduces each man through his death. All of them—Álvaro, Sílvio, Ribeiro, Neto, and Ciro—get their own chapter, highlighting their women, their intertwining relationships with each other, and ultimately their ends.

Álvaro is an old curmudgeon who is alone after leaving his ex-wife and daughter. Never very interested in sex despite many attempts, he finds women “nagging, sniveling, needy.” Sílvio lives his life to excess, up until his death, via eight balls and gaúchas. He was once married to Norma but cheated on her continuously.

Ciro is an elegant ladies’ man who gaslights his wife so badly that she is sent to a psychiatric hospital. Ribeiro is a simpleminded bachelor whose life is the beach and illicit purchases of Viagra. Neto, who loves and resents his domineering wife until her death, is the most staid.

Within each man’s story, Torres switches between the first and third person. The method showcases her agile hand at establishing voice, pacing, and tone. Hers is strong, economical prose.

Moments of humor offer much-needed relief from the unrelenting pessimism of the story. The machismo of each character is impressively rendered, though it creates an underlying current of resentment and unhappiness that can be overwhelming.

The story of each man could be considered a cautionary tale about the damage brought on through his own faults. The ever-present misogyny, realistically explicit, is sometimes difficult to read. These unlikable characters meet just and uncomfortably gratifying ends.

The End is vivid and irascible as it confronts the reality of aging, regrets, and death.

Reviewed by Monica Carter
July/August 2017

A Brazilian Movie Star’s Novel About Very Badly Behaved Men
By Hermione HobyNovember 27, 2017

Fernanda Torres’s novel “The End” tackles machismo and mortality.Photograph by Rachel Torres / Alamy
Decades ago, when the Brazilian movie actor Fernanda Torres was eighteen, she starred in what she recently described as “the worst ‘King Lear’ ever,” a production that took place in a shopping-mall theatre in Rio de Janeiro. As Cordelia, she had one long scene, “and then I would have to wait two hours to die.” For the first few nights, she kicked around backstage and played pinball. Later, she gave up and went home to have dinner with her handsome new husband. “And, when I came back, all my colleagues were still on that stage, playing ‘King Lear’! And then I just started laughing.” For the monthlong duration of the play’s run, the teen-age Torres was “laughing dead, I was laughing alive. I couldn’t control it.” Her fellow-actors tried being stern, they tried pleading, but it was hopeless. Reverence had been replaced with absurdity. “Acting is something very delicate,” she said. “It’s a child playing, you have to be playing, if you step one inch to the side it’s ridiculous and you’ll be lost.”
English stage actors have a term for breaking character like this, specifically for the childlike attacks of giggles that strike when one is meant to be playing it straight: “corpsing.” The word’s blend of the morbid and the hysterical capture the events and mood of “The End,” a riotous, sex-stuffed novel by Torres, which takes Technicolor pleasure in detailing the deaths of five incorrigible old beach bums of the Bossa Nova generation. In her home country, where Torres is a huge star best known for her role on the sitcom “Tapas & Beijos” (“Slaps & Kisses”), on which she plays a single woman working in a bridal store, “The End” has sold over two hundred thousand copies. It has also made Torres a début novelist at the age of fifty. On a recent visit to New York, shortly after the publication of the English-language edition, she seemed delighted by this situation. She explained that writing a book about death did not much change how she thought about her own mortality. “What this book gave me was a feeling of being able to write at the age of forty-eight. So it’s the opposite: it gave me a new life.”
She was spurred by an interest in the last five minutes of someone’s life, rather than their death itself. “What will you remember? Who knows. What is a good life? Depends on how you die—that’s how you really know what kind of life you had.” Her five men, whom she kills off in reverse chronology, are “united by male allegiance, women, and the beach, in that order.” We begin with Alvaro, the last to die, a morose, once cuckolded accountant who can’t stand his grandkids, regrets every pet he had, and leaves this world while crossing the street: he’s mown down by his neighbor, “the heartless witch from 704.” Silvio, the penultimate death, is an exhausting hedonist whose death notice, written by his son, confidently denounces an “ill-famed father, unfaithful husband, abominable grandfather and disloyal friend.” His son adds, “I apologize to everyone who, like me, suffered affronts and insults, and invite you to his much-awaited internment.” The band is joined by Ribeiro, an eternal adolescent whose hobbies include seducing virgins at the beach, and the unhappily married Neto, the best and most boring of the lot. Finally, there is Ciro, the group’s idolized Adonis, a man so smooth that he dives to pluck lobsters from the ocean for his lady loves. He also proves to be the most reprehensible of the five.
Interwoven with these monologues are the stories of the wives, children, mistresses, and sex workers who suffer these men in all their excesses, jealousies, and misdemeanors. Torres described the book to me as “the epitaph of the macho—it’s funny as hell and at the same time it’s terrible!” At Alvaro’s funeral service, for example, a disillusioned priest, who, after presiding over too many funerals, feels himself to be “God’s undertaker,” experiences his own version of “corpsing”—not laughter but something worse. Weary and bitter, he kicks open the door, strides into the room and, to the aghast congregation of mourners awaiting spiritual consolation, he bellows, “Who’s next?”
That question now has a timely, uneasy resonance, as we try and resist the morbid guessing game of which famous and powerful man will follow Weinstein, Spacey, and others in falling from grace. With America undergoing a mass reckoning with male sexuality, a novel like this feels both taboo and gleeful, a guilty kind of reprieve. “My people are hedonists from Rio, but they are sweet flowers compared to Trump,” Torres said. The central and most colorful event within the lifelong friendship of these five men is an orgy, and, as in a Pirandello play, it’s relayed to us through multiple perspectives. The behavior of everyone involved is bad, heedless, and rendered with gusto. “I always find it interesting how men like to be with each other,” Torres said with good humor. “Men like to grab each other, they are fond of each other! This is the subject of the book, male friendship, and an orgy is a way of being with your pals, with your guys, and that’s why the orgy scene is the center of the whole thing.”
Many female American actors have found the courage, in recent weeks, to hold accountable the men who’ve wronged them. Torres, who grew up in a matriarchal household, as the daughter of the Oscar-nominated actress Fernanda Montenegro and the actor Fernando Torres, understands herself to be an exception in terms of her experience of male oppression within her profession. “I’ve never experienced any situation where I felt afraid, or obliged to accept a producer, actor, or director’s approach. I was in charge of my life and had freedom to choose,” she said, adding, “Of course I’ve dealt with machismo in my life, but I always felt that I was the one who should liberate myself. But this is dangerous to say, because it’s like saying women are blamed for their oppression. So we are living in a very delicate time.” She continued, “I don’t feel like a woman being oppressed by men. I don’t fear writing under the skin of men. I adored writing in the skin of men. To write under the skin of a man just released me from myself.” Fiction by women that includes a female narrator is often assumed to be autobiography, she explained. “So doing it through a man, or five men, it was wonderful! I wrote very freely about those bad-behaviored men.” Then she added, with a wide smile, “But I took a great pleasure in killing them.”