Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu: Dangerous Self-Knowledge

Abreu, Caio Fernando. Moldy Strawberries. Trans. from the Portuguese by Bruno Dantas Lobato.  Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Press. 2022. 

Caio Fernando Abreu, or Caio F. (as he signed his letters and manuscripts), died in 1996, but was most active in the 70s and 80s, when he first wrote the highly taboo and scandalizing stories.  The stories in this collection, first published in the 1970s and 80s, feel as though they were written yesterday. The descriptions are visceral and unsettling - almost as though one were a large brass cymbal or a gong hanging from cords that continues to vibrate long after being struck with a wooden mallet. His body is your body, and your body is lost somewhere in the collective consciousness of the stories, where desire is mixed with shame, confusion, Dionysian abandon fueled by a seething rage for connection. 

 

Some of the stories, such as “The Survivors,” are experimental in form. "The Survivors" is a 7-page single stream-of-consciousness paragraph that blends art, music, philosophical and psychological ideas with the memories of a relationship that may have just ended (the narrator isn’t sure). What is left is “saudade” - the deep, melancholic longing so characteristic of Brazilian music and literature. I’m not sure which story was the most unsettling, but the one that first comes to mind is “Sergeant Garcia,” the story of a corrupt police officer who arrests adolescent boys and young men to physically and sexually assault, all the while maintaining a charade of hypermasculinity.

Caio F. died in 1996 of AIDS in a Brazil deeply conflicted about homosexuality.  His impact on literature was profound, with the sense of a hand-held movie camera, with jerky quick cuts, somewhere between cinema verite and a tone poem. The collection of short stories opens with a sense of sambas and saudade and ends with classical suite (“Moldy Strawberries” with the sections, Prelude, Allegro Agitado, Adagio Sostenuto, Andante Ostinato, and Minuet and Rondo), that begins with the taste of fruit going bad, but ends with a reflection on the possibility of growing strawberries in one’s own garden. The ending is life-affirming, which is a relief, because through the stories, the reader experienced harrowing encounters in a world that denies gay sexuality, and in doing so, creates cruelty, hypocrisy and obsession.

-- Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.

 

Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.

 

Saadat Hasan Manto's The Dog of Tithwal: Precarious Lives during the India-Pakistan Partition Years

Saadat Hasan Manto. The Dog of Tithwal. Translated from the Urdu by Khalid Hasan, Aatish Taseer, and Muhammad Umar Memon. Introduction by Vijay Seshadri. Brooklyn, NY:  Archipelago Press. 2021.

Sadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was born in British India and when India was partitioned into Pakistan, he, as a Muslim, had to move to Lahore, Pakistan. It was in Pakistan that he began to produce the vast number of stories, radio plays, and essays that made him a formidable influence in Urdu-language writing. Manto’s life and times were shaped by conflict, disruption, and confusion as Kafka-esque political absurdities erected boundaries and divisions between previously happy cohabitants of a beautiful land. 

The story that is also the name of the collection of short stories, “The Dog of Tithwal,” perfectly illustrates the tragic absurdity of a politically engineered clash between the Hindus and the Muslims. They take up arms against each other and decide to fight on the border.  However, no one really has the heart to fight; it’s a political imperative imposed from on high. In the No Man’s Land between the two sides is a rag-tag, importunate dog who is regularly fed by both sides, and both consider the dog to be of their nationality. The dog survives, somehow, in this existential limbo until one day (spoiler alert), he is killed.  The dog perfectly embodies the capricious nature of fate, and the razor-thin margin of safety that keeps people and dogs alive.  

That razor-thin margin between life and death is also apparent in “Ten Rupees,” in which a mother faces the terrible consequences of having sold her young daughter into prostitution. In “Kingdom’s End,” an educated man occupies an office and yet does not seem to have any work to speak of. He falls in love with a voice on the telephone that started out as a wrong number. The precarious nature of his life is perfectly illustrated as he falls ill with a high fever just before he is to meet her. In “The Monkeys Revolt,” monkeys attack the insulting idea that humans, whom they consider to be quite beneath them, “evolved” from them. 

Other stories in the collection are likewise intelligent, sympathetic, and they unflinchingly face life in a world with few safety nets but with many ideas about the nature of survival, both physical and intellectual. 

-- Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.

 

Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.