[Editorial note: Readers of the following interview with multifaceted Brazilian writer Fernando Bonassi will be repeatedly struck by similarities to the corruption, brutality, and violence of much in U.S. society, as well as in other failed or subject-to-failing democracies.]
With the novel Violence, Fernando Bonassi completes one of the most bruising trilogies in the last twenty years of Brazilian literature. The book, together with its predecessors, Lust and Degeneration, maps the entrails of Brazilian society, especially chronic problems which became glaring with Jair Bolsonaro as president (2019-22): prejudice against poor people, Blacks, and homosexuals, the weakening of the democracy and the brazen genocide of the Brazilian people in the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Bonassi’s words, Violence and the two other books in the series show “what we have made of ourselves” in the last two decades, “the horrifying country we have turned into, the homeland of a stupid and unthinkably inhumane elite.”
The narrative, executed in brief chapters and gelid prose, tells the story of an assault on a deluxe condominium, inhabited by the political advisor to a Brazilian presidential candidate. The thieves believe there are mountains of money hidden within the walls of the condo.
The setting recalls Rubem Fonseca’s classic short story “Happy New Year,” in which the guests at a New Year’s Eve party are surprised by an act of violence. However, Bonassi’s book has Quentin Tarantino-like touches that make it even more violent and cruel than Fonseca’s story.
Apart from the inhumanity of the Brazilian upper middle class, Violence delves deep into the mud of politics, especially the campaigns of the major parties, where all kinds of ideologies slip through the sieve when the only goal is to win the election.
After 15 years producing scripts for a TV Globo series, Bonassi is once again a freelancer, “twirling my little purse, selling my wares,” in his words. Recently, he wrote a play that will be directed in São Paulo by Nelson Baskerville. He also wrote the script for his first feature-length film as a director, called Disdain.
His pessimistic vision of Brazilian society contrasts with the blind faith Bonassi has in his craft and literature in general. For him, “words are the last refuge of formal and moral freedom. To read a novel, to suffer and empathize with other people’s suffering, is still the best and most potent kind of knowledge.”
Rebinski: As the title makes clear, your new novel exposes the violence to which we Brazilians, unfortunately, are accustomed. Do you believe that Brazil’s biggest problem is the violence bred by social inequalities?
Bonassi: It’s not just that violence is the consequence of social inequities, but a kind of overall negligence about the future, especially on the part of the elites, who prefer to die in armed robberies protecting their Rolex watches than to be part of a culture of income distribution, democratization of property, and taking care of the country’s natural resources. This is a snapshot, a momentary diagnosis, but there is also this morbid perception—devastatingly stupid, tedious, and indecent—that nothing changes, or that everything changes and then returns to the same ominous place where it started. Bolsonaro’s fascism is the reincarnation of the “basement tigers” (clandestine torturers) of the last dictatorship, which was the reincarnation of the previous ones, the republic of soldiers and bananas, of slavocratic empires, of the extermination of the original peoples. Our zombie history makes violence and leniency twins. Despite minor victories of identity that often seduce those new to protests, we are a society of lynch mobs and suicides, whose “talented tenth” has become completely dehumanized in the last six years. The media make the Nazism of the extreme right seem natural, summoning bullshit-spouting conservatives to air their moronic views in lengthy interviews. We throw together a bunch of fuckups to defend the principles of morality and justice. And to make matters worse, most of the country doesn’t give a shit.
Rebinski: Violence is the last of a trilogy of novels united by a thematic arc that relates to the Brazilian middle class and to social problems like chronic poverty and prejudice–all of it against the background of the contemporary political scene. How do your books fit into current Brazilian literature?
Bonassi: I like the idea that the novel is an echo of what is happening, not just a slice of reality but the Big Story, the contemporaneousness, traversing the lives of the characters, determining certain encounters and conflicts. Violence, even though it wasn’t planned like this, closes a trilogy about–as I like to put it–“what we made of ourselves in the last 20 years.” Lust, the first novel of this series, published by Record in 2016, has as its central plot the insurmountable difficulties confronting an ordinary guy who wants to put a swimming pool in the backyard of his place in a suburban housing development on the outskirts of the city since the neighborhood understands that “democracy is bad for everyone.” The book alludes to a kind of euphoria that contaminated all of us in the last Lula government, followed by the hangover and the institutional immorality that led us to the parliamentary coup of Michel Temer against President Dilma [Rousseff]. Degeneration, published in 2021, narrates, in twelve hours, the bureaucratic wanderings of a man trying to liberate and cremate the body of his father––a violent character, torturer of the neighborhood precinct–with whom his children have always had a difficult relationship. The old man’s death occurs on the eve of Jair Bolsonaro’s election as president of the republic in 2018. That is, just when the main character, the son, thinks that he is freeing himself from his stupid and violent past, this very same past is reborn for all Brazilians in the person of a president with a Nazi vocation. And, finally, this book Violence which, by narrating the attempted robbery of a mansion in which suitcases of money are supposedly hidden, echoes the cynicism that has infected us, at the moment, since we live in a divided country whose elite balks at doing its civilizational homework (that is, the inclusion of the socially marginalized, equitable income distribution, property democratization).
Rebinski: Your book illuminates the social split in our country, with the rich and those pretending to be rich on one side, and a horde of all those in disfavor on the other. Aren’t you afraid that people who read the book will label you a “Manichean?”
Bonassi: No, it’s exactly the opposite! Brazilian violence is very rich in subtleties and layered meanings: professional, racial, economic, and moral. For instance, nothing is less Manichean than the hardon we get from the use of force. It’s nauseating and immoral but subtle, sensual, and political as well. Violence is a film noir police thriller. It activates characters from our “crime scene” in which rich and poor, whites and blacks, men and women wrangle, yes, but they also communicate, generate contact and sparks between the poles, “contaminate each other,” create plots, narratives, a whole “way of being” and of living together, a philosophical vocabulary, almost religious if you will, social behaviors that when all is said and done, define us. They exhibit this horrific country we’ve become, this land of an idiot elite and unthinkable inhumanities.
Rebinski: How can literature (if it’s even possible) help us comprehend the reality of a country as unequal as Brazil?
Bonassi: If we take the disparagement of words (written and read) on social networks into account, communication transformed into “something functional,” I think that only art, in general, and fictional literature, in particular, can account for what is happening here now. With the society divided, in reciprocal demonization, on a permanent war footing, only human narratives can restore the reason and feeling we’ve lost and transmit a reasonable emotional awareness (only art can accomplish these two things) of how we arrived here, at this tragic human and social stalemate.
Rebinski: In other words, you think, to use a worn-out expression, that we are still experiencing an endless “class struggle?”
Bonassi: That’s what it appears to be in a panoramic vision: social inequality continues to create victims on a global scale! What we are watching in the Middle East, for instance, is part of a power project, the forces of economic imperialism in action. Kill people! But if we aren’t able to understand how this affects our daily lives, right here, in our work relationships, of course, but also the toll it takes on our affections, then we will remain enclosed where we are at the moment, in an eternal asininity that reproduces itself and is reiterated by every new generation.
Rebinski: The novel’s climax occurs when assailants invade a dinner at the house of the political advisor of a presidential candidate. Every kind of violence is unleashed, even sexual. Was this scene an homage to the literature of Rubem Fonseca, specifically to the story “Happy New Year?” Do you believe your work is in some way a dialogue with Fonseca’s?
Bonassi: Rubem Fonseca is the most important Brazilian writer when it comes to the creation of an artistically worthwhile, culturally dense Brazil big-city style. He was the one who lent a Dostoyevskian dimension and grandeur to chronicles about Rio de Janeiro. In terms of style, he’s the greatest. All of us who came after him owe him a lot. The scene in Violence is the same as “Happy New Year,” but the misdirections of the stories follow different narrative and moral tracks. At the least, you are going to understand that people from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro cope with the situation in different ways. It could be a good subject for debate, the differences and similarities between the two works.
Rebinski: Violence is written in short chapters, alternating subjects and characters in a nonlinear narrative. There is also a rather “impersonal” voice speaking, many times literally, in Wikipedia language. What effect did you imagine this language would have?
Bonassi: The detective novel has a lot of puzzles: the portions into which you slice the information, the order in which they are presented, what you show, and what you withhold are impelling forces which capture the reader’s attention. Violence is this unfocused kaleidoscope that corrects itself in accordance with the clues that are being revealed, some before others. That’s the game. The secret of its success is the ability to surprise at each stage of this “narrative evolution.” Sometimes the story seems to detour to a point “outside the curve,” but a number of chapters later, you discover that that information, which before seemed disconnected, is a substantive part of the unraveling story. These are the excitements and delights of the detective narrative! Of a Brazilian detective story, for sure. I’m rooting for the book to find an audience that appreciates the genre. It’s going to be cool hearing from them.
Rebinski: You told me that the book was written during the pandemic and that you were very angry. What bothered you the most at that moment?
Bonassi: To live in a country on the verge of fascism, with a populace of such limitations about to elect a moral and political excrescence like Jair Bolsonaro as president of the republic; to see more than 700,000 people die because of the sheer indolence of a government of reluctant worms, of violent earth-flatteners, of concealed supremacists; to see a second-rate press giving shelter to the worst ideas and the most unqualified people, all in the name of a distorted idea of “democracy”; to understand that the police and the armed forces are coopted and equipped by a project to empower overt Nazis; for us to be, for these and other reasons, a genuine impediment to a more peaceful world order. Tell me, who will bring about our denazification? You could fill a hundred pages with the pestilence that bubbled up and keeps flowing from the sewers of Bolsonaro’s bootlickers.
Rebinski: You live in São Paulo. Does the chaos of the city feed you or perturb you?
Bonassi: I like to live in a city that never sleeps. It’s a very hard city for those who don’t have money, but it’s not always fatal. Around here, even organized crime is orderly! I live near downtown. I never lack for things to write about with so many people crashing into each other and working like crazy just to get by. Chaos, however, is never good. São Paulo has been scrapped by a series of neglectful administrations. Few politicians who are elected stay here. The city is nothing but a trampoline for other offices. At this moment the city is rotten and in the dark. Things can always get worse. And they have gotten worse here. We’re in shit.
Rebinski: Violence openly displays the corrupt (and commonplace) side of Brazilian politics. What is your opinion about the politicians and parties that take turns in power?
Bonassi: I covered political campaigns as a writer during the 1990s for various ideological leanings, and no matter how “moral” they claimed to be, I never reported my services. I was always paid in dollars, there were prostitutes available for the employees, drugs were easy to find, and other things that have little to do with politics in a miserable country like Brazil. What begins this way, even at a time of democratic reconstruction, it’s clear that it won’t amount to shit. Another thing: when a candidate is campaigning, they become a product, wanting to win at any cost and trashing their convictions and principles. If you have moral itches, they become convulsions. All this experience is in Violence. In the meantime, we are living through something worse: a horribly divisive, dehumanizing political project proposed by the most worthless right-wing extremists to which many important and apparently reasonable people subscribed. The hatred and disgust of my childhood experience with the 1964 dictatorship and the fear of a new one are always going to make me remain on the side of the democrats.
Rebinski: Among the finalists for the Oceanos prize this year there is not a single Brazilian novel. However, there are five books by Brazilian poets competing for the prize. How do you evaluate this situation, seeing as the Oceanos is one of the most important prizes in Portuguese-language literature?
Bonassi: A prize is important, but it is also only the result of a group of readers at a given moment. Brazilian poetry, especially that written by women, is very powerful, and it doesn’t surprise me that they have monopolized the list of competitors. I have read some good Brazilian novels published in 2023, but the taste of the jury is what counts. The juries for art awards rarely refute or even discuss [the winner]. As far as the Oceanos prize is concerned, other than being fundamental for the integration of Portuguese-speaking countries, it is rarely controversial.
Rebinski: You have a lengthy trajectory as a scriptwriter for film and television. How are these activities going? What have you done recently, aside from publishing novels?
Bonassi: I have been at TV Globo for the last 15 years where, in collaboration with Marçal Aquino, I created and developed two series and two miniseries over eight seasons. Now I’ve returned to the freelancer’s sidewalk, twirling my little purse, selling my wares. I wrote a play for the theatre that’s going to be directed by my friend Nelson Baskerville here in São Paulo. I wrote a film that I’m going to direct myself, called Disdain. We’re struggling to put the money together. I write every day. I sell my work to anyone who wants to buy it, with certain small exceptions. I offer my more or less fresh fish at the market every morning.
Rebinski: There is an abundance of series about crimes and investigations streaming. To what do you credit the public’s interest in stories about violence, crimes, and death?
Bonassi: There is nothing more exciting than a human being facing violence and death. We observe, as readers and spectators, ecstatic and destroyed, the finiteness of others, and our own! It’s very rich fictional and moral material. We learn a lot when we witness calamity. That’s why tragedies exist, as a matter of fact. To teach. To anticipate, to improve what remains alive. They are, for me, an inexhaustible source of wisdom: particularly in a poor and foolish country like ours, in which violence and brutality have become languages beyond words.
Rebinski: You’re 60 years old now. How has the passage of time been for you? And specifically concerning your work, the writing itself, what changed? Do you feel you’re a better writer than in the 1990s when you began?
Bonassi: It’s my experience that, when it comes to writing, unlike soccer, you perform better the more time passes. Your vocabulary grows, your understanding of narrative improves, gets clearer, you avoid losing yourself in the middle of the road. But none of this is guaranteed. Look, tomorrow I’m going to get up and start writing but, unlike a baker, I won’t know what to make. I have a plan, but not a mold, nor a recipe with which to begin. I like it that way. To imagine. To transform things into words. To give “fictional materiality” to the best and worst things I can think of.
Rebinski: You’re a writer. Literature will always have value in your life. But what do you imagine is the place of literature in the world today, a world ruled by the internet and, clearly, more and more by money?
Bonassi: Literature remains the last place for formal and moral freedom with words. The need to communicate quickly, to “seal the deal,” omnipresent on the social networks, kills any possibility of literary feeling. It can cause some effect, but it won’t lead to the proper reflection necessary for true knowledge, rooted in the soul. To read a novel, to suffer and be moved by the suffering of others, is still the best and most potent kind of knowledge. And still democratic enough! Violence is a terrifying book, but I believe that imagining the worst is still the best way of preparing for horror.
A big hug!
Translated by Peter Lownds for People’s World. The original interview in Portuguese, appearing in Rascunho, the journal of Brazilian literature (no. 284, December 1, 2023), can be read here. This translation eliminates the original ellipses (…), which may have indicated passages deleted from the complete recorded interview or possibly dramatic pauses, but which, if left in, might imply that we deleted passages ourselves.
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