The Sun on My Head
Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A bestselling literary sensation in Brazil, a powerful debut short-story collection about favela life in Rio de Janeiro
In The Sun on My Head, Geovani Martins recounts the experiences of boys growing up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the early years of the twenty-first century. Drawing on his childhood and adolescence, Martins uses the rhythms and slang of his neighborhood dialect to capture the texture of life in the slums, where every day is shadowed by a ubiquitous drug culture, the constant threat of the police, and the confines of poverty, violence, and racial oppression. And yet these are also stories of friendship, romance, and momentary relief, as in “Rolézim,” where a group of teenagers head to the beach. Other stories, all uncompromising in their realism and yet diverse in narrative form, explore the changes that occur when militarized police occupy the favelas in the lead-up to the World Cup, the cycles of violence in the narcotics trade, and the feelings of invisibility that define the realities of so many in Rio’s underclass.
The Sun on My Head is a work of great talent and sensitivity, a daring evocation of life in the favelas by a rising star rooted in the community he portrays.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Young men contend with the violence and corruption of Rio de Janerio in this tantalizing debut from Brazilian Martins. The characters in these stories represent a full spectrum of favela life, from the aspiring graffiti artist, Fernando, who longs to give his son a better childhood than his father offered him ("The Tag") to the drug pusher forced to dispose of the body of a customer he kills in a fit of pique ("The Crossing"). In "Spiral," a student who commutes to a tony neighborhood becomes obsessed with its residents, "who inhabited a world unknown to me"; he stalks one for months before he sees in his subject's "eyes the horror of realization." Martins's characters and the situations they navigate grab the reader's attention, but he often shies away from offering a resolution. "TGIF" defies this tendency, accompanying its protagonist on a harrowing subway ride to score drugs in a distant favela and ending in a confrontation with a crooked cop. In Martins's Rio, every interaction is a negotiation, and everyone is "in the same boat: hard up, dopeless, wanting to chill beachside." This is a promising work from an intriguing new voice.
