Brazil: The tear in the burqa

We had no idea about the crisis that had been hitting our parents’ marriage for months. We didn’t even know who was running the country. We lived under the strange dictatorship of childhood: we saw without recognizing; we heard without understanding; We talked and no one took us seriously. But we were happy under the regime. The fabric of our little lives was dark and hid us completely, a burqa without eyes.”

With an elegance and originality that is second to none, Victor Heringer intertwines the state of society in Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s with the tragic coming-of-age story of his first-person narrator Camilo. The first crack in the burka occurs when Camilo’s father brings a strange boy with him. The disabled doctor’s son sees the vital black orphan Cosmim, who likes to roam around the former slave quarters, as an intruder – until hate (in the truest sense of the word: suddenly) turns into love.

The fact that his father was responsible for keeping the regime’s torture victims alive and that Cosmim was possibly an offspring of these prisoners only gradually dawns on Camilo, who returns to his childhood home in Rio 40 years later. “The Love of Individual Men” jumps back and forth between the two time levels. Camilo has lost faith in humanity since his teenage love was brutally taken away from him. The traumatized person constantly fails in his desperate attempt to keep his memory alive (or was it just an invention of his “crippled mind”?), to escape the curse of his father’s blood and to become master of his history.

While wallowing in his longing for death, bitterness and defeatism, he comes dangerously close to the Darwinism of the perpetrators. “A human and a rat only differ by three hundred genes… If this species were dependent on the goodwill of its members to continue living, it would be screwed.” And it is, because climate collapse shines in this one from a merciless sun and The flood-filled book of 2016 has already been sealed.

The tenderness inherent in this novel, despite its harshness, encompasses both author and reader.

In his swansong, Camilo categorizes things like people and conveys the brutality of a patriarchal society characterized by violence and hatred towards its queer, exploited, poor, non-white, disabled and female members in equally drastic language. Even after the official end of the dictatorship, people continue to disappear without a trace and passers-by in the city center relieve their stress at night “by smashing street children’s heads with paving stones and scattering brains in all directions.”

After the description of Cosmim’s cruel end, the tide of the narrative turns and the numbering of the short chapters runs backwards. The perpetrator’s son, in turn, takes in an orphan who is in a relationship with a murderer and allows a completely different kind of love into his life. When the boy moves in, the perspective changes to a more merciful narrator.

The tenderness inherent in this novel, despite its harshness, encompasses both author and reader. The multimedia artist Heringer, who was born in Rio in 1988, called on his Internet followers to tell him the name of their first love – he incorporated the list into the novel and, last but not least, broke the isolation of the writer. »It was one of the most beautiful things that ever happened to me, this pact of trust.«

His second and last novel is so playful and well thought out, so full of formal intent and anarchic, that the majority of the new releases look old. Boiled beef tongues speak, the belly of an eye throbs and insecure pubescents “kik-giggle”. Heringer himself, as he put it in an interview, settled in “a small guest room” in the house of the family of innovative novelists since Laurence Sterne. Even if he ventures “beyond the boundaries of the book” with included drawings, lists, symbols and photos, “everything returns to him in the end”: “When writing the novel, for example, I learned how to draw like the child Camilo (… ) I’m starting to water myself down in the books I write. In the future, I hope, I can finally be a nobody in peace.

The fact that his novel is now being published for the first time in German by the März Verlag should have pleased him, who had a lot of sympathy for small publishers with daring, exquisite programs. Volumes of complete works seemed “like coffins” to the depression-stricken author. When he committed suicide shortly before the age of 30, he left far too few behind.

Victor Heringer: The love of individual men. A.d. Portugal. v. Maria Hummitzsch. März-Verlag, 208 pages, hardcover, €24 (released on October 28th).