Erico Verissimo – Prodigious Brazilian Narrator
Erico Verissimo, the son of a pharmaceutical businessman, was born in 1905, in Cruz Alta, southern Brazil, of Portuguese descent. In the past, his family was prosperous, but at the time of his birth his financial situation was becoming difficult. His father was a bon vivant who spent money carelessly.
At the age of 15, he attended the Liceo Cruzeiro do Sul in Porto Alegre, a Protestant establishment, but returned to Cruz Alta without graduating. In 1922 his parents separated and he stayed with his mother. In his hometown, he worked a series of trades until he finally left for Porto Alegre in 1930 to become a writer. The combination of that family trauma and the subsequent lonely death of his father in São Paulo would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Along with Jorge Amado, Erico Verissimo is one of the most popular writers in Brazil. He attended the literary circle of the writers of the 30s in Porto Alegre. And together with Dyonelio Machado, with whom he shared a literary prize in 1935, he created the modern urban fiction of southern Brazil. Because of his clarity and accuracy, his prose is a joy to read. It is well known that Verissimo used to call himself a storyteller. But, in fact, he was a bona fide novelist, and his stories reflect his remarkable versatility, his penetrating vision of characters, his brilliance in describing a scene, his talent for probing people’s hidden fears and desires. common. Obviously, he loved his characters, not for whatever virtues they might possess, but just as they are.
In 1929, Erico Verissimo began contributing stories to newspapers and magazines. The first story of him, “barking of Gado“(“rustler“), appeared in the Globo Magazine in 1929 and his first novel, clarissait was published in 1933. In addition to many short stories, children’s books, autobiography and travel, he wrote about thirty novels. clarissa it is an impressionistic portrait of the life of a naive young woman with passages from prose poems. Her second novel Cross Roads (Crossing), was published in 1935. His third novel, Music ao Longecontinuation of his first novel, it won the Machado de Assis Prize in 1935.
Erico Verissimo first appeared in English in 1943, when his second novel was translated by LC Kaplan and published by Macmillan in New York. Crossing it is often taken to represent the author’s condemnation of petty bourgeois hypocrisy. More importantly, it is representative of Verissimo’s narrative art, made up of short stories lived by characters from various social backgrounds, thus creating a narrative that does not follow a linear sequence. So the story does not have a central core.
This fragmentation technique points to the general question of Verissimo’s influence on fiction and, beyond that, to the broader question of its place in the development of Brazilian modernism. The debt to Aldous Huxley and John Dos Passos was fully evident and in his memoirs Verissimo admitted the influence of Huxley’s technical counterpoint. In an article written for the literary supplement of the New York Times in 1943, book critic William Dubois commented that Erico Verissimo had an “electric” style. Note that Verissimo himself translated Huxley’s novel in 1934 points counter (1928) into Portuguese. A second point to note is that another important skill our author inherited from the English tradition was how to handle the passage of time in fiction. But it seems to me that the really important influence exists at a deeper level of composition.
On the other hand, critics agree that the main influences in the early stage of his career were Francis James and Katherine Mansfield. Note that he was a translator for Edgar Wallace, James Hilton, John Steinbeck, Robert Nathan, Katherine Mansfield, W. Somerset Maugham, among others. Of these, he had no doubt that Maugham was a supreme master storyteller. Surely English literature will be a constant reference in Verissimo’s work. During the period that he lived in the United States he had the pleasure of meeting some of his idols: Thornton Wilder, Pearl S. Buck, W. Somerset Maugham, John Dos Passos and Aldous Huxley. At the same time, Verissimo was fluent in French and in 1949 he had the honor of delivering a welcoming speech to the novelist Albert Camus in Porto Alegre. Perhaps because he did not like the experiments with the language of the modern French novel, the structural innovations of the English novelists caught his attention.
Olhai os Lírios do Campo (Consider the lilies of the field, Macmillan, 1948), Verissimo’s first hit, appeared in 1938. The main characters are two doctors. A doctor dedicated to social issues, Olivia falls in love with her colleague, Eugenio. He came from a poor background and was looking for an easy fortune. Eager for social recognition, he turns his back on Olivia and decides to marry a wealthy woman. But finally Eugenio and Olivia become lovers and have a daughter. The turning point for Eugenio occurs when Olivia is on her deathbed. One of the most evident advances between consider the lilies and the earlier fiction is in the milder and more biting use of dialogue. Free indirect speech is now used to describe the unspoken thoughts of the characters without resorting to conventional dialogue. Additionally, flashbacks are highlighted in italics to help the reader understand the passage of time.
Indeed, the novel is one of great pathos and at times an indulgent sentimentality that appealed immensely to its readers and was instrumental in building Verissimo’s great popularity. However, it must be admitted that the novel is also characteristic of Verissimo realism. The story takes place in the shadow of the 1930 Revolution. And there are even some critical comments about the political program of Getulio Vargas, the Brazilian dictator. Since his second and fourth novels touched on some sensitive social issues, Verissimo came under the suspicion that communism was misleading the public into believing that his books were immoral.
What immediately appealed to him was the search for freedom and the inner moods of his characters. Traditionally, critics divide Verissimo’s fiction into three levels: a) the chronicle of cities and the bourgeoisie; (b) the historical review; and c) world society. The middle phase takes his art to a whole new dimension.
At the same time, it is important to recognize that, like postmodernist writers, Verissimo’s works demonstrate an awareness of their own fictionality. Verissimo continues to display his creativity for the rest of his life, eventually altering his trajectory when he realizes that his most important task was to recreate the history of his home state of Rio Grande do Sul. Surely the writing of Or Weather or Wind (the weather and the wind, Macmillan, 1951) marked a turning point in his career. The story consists of three parts and is Verissimo’s masterpiece. The composition and publication of the complete saga took place during the years 1947-1962. The story was translated into English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch.
In 1954 he appeared Note (Evening, Macmillan, 1956). People didn’t expect Erico Verissimo to write a dark novel. But it should be remembered that throughout his life he was an avid reader of mysteries. The novel takes the reader to a claustrophobic world where the amnesiac protagonist, “the Stranger”, searches for his identity. His companions on a ghastly night are a cynical pimp and a psychopathic dwarf, the two night birds he met in a seedy pub, a low cafe by the docks. And the Night throughout the City is always there oppressing the Stranger. Despite being a story about loneliness, there is a lot of humor in Evening.
Now it is necessary to look at the books in which Verissimo reveals his political thought. That is the theme of O Senhor Ambassador (His Excellency the AmbassadorMacmillan, 1967), published in 1965, and The prisoner, published in 1967. These novels should be seen as a development of Verissimo’s ideas on imperialism. Of course, the international panorama pervades the last literary stage of our author.
His Excellency the Ambassador it is set in the imaginary Central American republic of Sacramento and in Washington DC The novel shows the conflicts of an artist, Pablo Ortega, during the period in which he works in Washington with the Latino ambassador who represents the dictatorship. Pablo Ortega works hard to decide if he should support a communist revolution in Sacramento. Finally, in The prisoner Verissimo takes us to the Vietnam conflict and explores the moral conflict faced by a black lieutenant who apparently must torture a Vietcong prisoner.
Verissimo’s works seem to offer us many ways to manipulate conflict and enjoy life. Open to infinite reading possibilities, his fiction has finally achieved recognition. Erico Verissimo died of a heart attack in 1975.