After Life
An Ethnographic Novel
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Bruna Veríssimo, a youth from the hardscrabble streets of Recife, in Northeast Brazil, spoke with Tobias Hecht over the course of many years, reliving her early childhood in a raging and destitute home, her initiation into the world of prostitution at a time when her contemporaries had scarcely started school, and her coming of age against all odds.Hecht had originally intended to write a biography of Veríssimo. But with interviews ultimately spanning a decade, he couldn’t ignore that much of what he had been told wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. In Veríssimo’s recounting of her life, a sister who had never been born died tragically, while the very same rape that shattered the body and mind of an acquaintance occurred a second time, only with a different victim and several years later. At night, with the anthropologist’s tape recorder in hand, she became her own ethnographer, inventing informants, interviewing herself, and answering in distinct voices.
With truth impossible to disentangle from invention, Hecht followed the lead of Veríssimo, his would-be informant, creating characters, rendering a tale that didn’t happen but that might have, probing at what it means to translate a life into words.
A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anthropologist Hecht won a Margaret Mead award for At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil; his fiction debut, billed as an "ethnographic novel," charts the journey of a young anthropologist to a poor Brazilian city and into the human face of institutionalized poverty. During an earlier field trip to the port city of Recife, Zo had encountered a child, Beto, who touched her heart with his "timid curiosity" only to disappear into swirling, nomadic urban chaos. Years later, Zo , now 36 and a survivor of an emergency hysterectomy and her mother's death, returns to Brazil to do fieldwork and is amazed to find Beto is still alive. But "he" is now a fetching female vagabond of 21: "Beto died," she announces calmly. "I am Aparecita now." In a lumbering preface, Hecht reveals that Aparecita is based on a homeless prostitute, Bruna Verissimo, he encountered doing his own trip. While Zo 's dilemma of the anthropologist whose training ties her hands from helping Aparecita is perhaps not as compelling as Hecht believes, his evocation of the horrors and beauties of contemporary Brazil is skillful, and his portrait of a Northern woman adrift and paralyzed in a fecund tropical locale is incisive.
