Victor Sonkin. Good people

Good people
Jorge Amadou. Dona Flor and her two husbands. Translation by Yu. Kalugin

Victor Sonkin

Publication date: July 7, 2000

“ Everything here is exactly the same as yours,” said one Brazilian friend, “poverty, economic crisis, corruption. Only the weather is better, so people are not so angry.”

This is a deep, insightful observation. It becomes obvious when reading Latin American writers. In the novel about Dona Flor and her two husbands, the reader sees before himself the whole world of a provincial (but not too much - the state capital) Brazilian town of an uncertain time (most likely the sixties, judging by the date of writing of the work, the epigraph from Gagarin and the popularity of radio in the absence of television ). This world is very densely populated; if you set out to compile a list of characters in a novel, it would take many pages. But there is no need: these people appear and disappear, as in life, and you will not miss any plot lines if along the way you forget who Edgar Coco, Carlinhos Mascarenhas and pale Jenner Augusto from the Aracaju cabaret are. It is enough to remember Dona Flor and her two husbands.

Actually, one Dona Flor is enough. How does Amadou manage to build an entire novel around her? Why is this image so irresistibly charming? Okay, I personally like her as a woman; but I am sure that fans of dystrophic blondes will not be able to escape her charms.

But she is ordinary, exaggeratedly ordinary, not too sophisticated, not too smart. True, she is a good cook (although I can’t say that the gastronomic details of the book sharply increase salivation - probably from the sheer exoticism: who knows whether you will even want to try fried turtle with cassava flour). But her suffering, her household, her family and friendships, her neuroses and fears - everything is so ordinary, so mundane. This is not Anna Karenina or Scarlett O'Hara. But it’s catchy.

The story that Amadou tells resembles a mixture of a Latin American series and Dovlatov. What it has in common with a soap opera is unexpected twists and passions that flare up over trifles. The difference is that everything is resolved as in life, calmly and routinely. Dona Flor heard that some mulatto woman had a child with her husband. She herself is barren and is afraid that her husband will leave her for the sake of a child. She goes to her rival to beg her to give her the child to raise and kill two birds with one stone: to take away the mulatto’s trump card and get the child into the family. A showdown begins (the mulatto did not know that her Valdomiro was married... he himself promised to marry her...), and it immediately turns out that this is a misunderstanding and a slander; the mulatto's lover is a black chauffeur, who, coincidentally, is also named Valdomiro; The touched imaginary lover asks Dona Flor to become her baby's godmother. The melodrama is raised quite high, but does not turn into vulgarity. And there are many such examples.

What Dovlatov has in common with Don Flor is the forced drawing of the reader into a world in which only the author can freely navigate; and also - style, syntax. This is probably the merit of the translator, at least to the same extent as Amadou himself, but the abundance of ellipses and short phrases make the similarity undeniable (“I never trusted him... Just look at his face...” said Don Norm"). True, with Dovlatov everything is much funnier. But this is obvious to us, and a Brazilian might not understand what we are laughing at.

As I read the novel, I became more and more perplexed as to why Amadou and other Latin American celebrities, firstly, are called “magical realists” and, secondly, managed to become a global literary fashion for so long. Why not domestic villagers, for example? The world they describe is no less exotic for the average reader - or for a professor in a Western department of comparative literature. But Amadou seems to have nothing magical at all.

This feeling possessed me for three hundred pages. In three hundred and one, the turning point occurred so abruptly that I experienced mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was deceived: first three hundred pages - one novel, then the last sixty, which turn everything on its head and turn Dona Flor into something completely different, not what this book pretended to be for so long. On the other hand, a sigh of relief: the literary critics and professors were right, realism is, yes, magical. Although I felt sorry for the ideas for this essay, which I began to slowly accumulate and suddenly crumbled into dust.

It just seems to me that magic is not a sufficient explanation for such popularity. In general, it is not difficult to mix exoticism and magic into an everyday novel; but this is not enough to write like Amadou. After reading Dona Flor, a strange thought suddenly strikes me: there are no negative characters in this book. There are worthless, and unhappy, and grumpy, and stupid. But there are no evil ones. No one. Even if someone has villainous potential, circumstances never allow it to develop into something truly harmful.

So it’s not all about magic alone. And also that the weather in Brazil is good and the people there are kind.

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Web presence

The web presence could have been better. But the writer is not English-speaking, and the “brnet,” or whatever the Internet in Brazil should be called, is less accessible due to linguistic isolation, including from its neighbors in Latin America. From English-language sites, we can recommend a simple advertising page with links to Amazon (in the Brazilian context, more relevant than ever); page the Dona Flor in English (translated by Harriet De Onis) directly from Amazon, with several reader comments; we are also promised a history of Brazilian literature (I didn’t get through to this page), and are also invited to the state of Bahia , where the novel takes place. The page claims that Bahia is a major tourist center of the country. If this is true, then the design could be better.

In other languages: you can read about Amado and see good photographs (Spanish), as well as get acquainted with Portuguese-language sites both in the metropolis (" Writings of Amado ": be careful, there is something hanging explorer) and in the colony (article by Mario Vargas Llosa " Jorge Amado and Paradise ").

Films were made about Dona Flor. The most famous one was made in 1978, and the main character was played by the Brazilian film star Sonia Braga ( here is a candid photo of her, I even thought it was a fake; but on the other hand, apparently not). She doesn't look like Dona Flor. Her face is unkind. There is a very useful summary of this film on a domestic website with the stupid name kinno.net. Another film adaptation of the novel is a mini-series filmed in 1998.

There is very little information in Russian. A bad summary for the publication of a novel in the pocket series of the publishing house "Azbuka" (and the picture is worth something!). Tourist information (from the Ukrainian server) about the state of Bahia, its attractions and hotels. The most amazing resource, in my opinion, is an essay on the history of Brazilian literature (titles of chapters: “Parnassian School”, “Symbolism”, “Forerunners of Modernism”, etc.) on the website of what you might think - the Brazilian Embassy ! I wonder if at least one of our embassies has something similar, in a good local language? Fantastic. I'm telling you - good people.