Barren Lives     by Graciliano Ramos, Translated by Ralph E. Dimmick Original title: Vidas Secas Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by University of Texas Press Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback, 165 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.50 x 8.95 x 5.98 ISBN: 0292701330 List Price: $12.95, £8.23 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.23 Buy online from Amazon.com for $12.95 Published by Texas UP Pub. Date: 1965 Pub. Place: USA Format: Hardcover List Price: $12.95 Not available for ordering Published by Texas UP Pub. Date: 1965 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback List Price: $7.95 Not available for ordering

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Dating back to 1938 this is one of the all-time great novels of rural existence in Brazil, telling of the life of a small migrant family (and their dog) in the harsh social and ecological conditions of the drought-plagued state of Alagoas. In an elementally sparse ranching landscape of scrubland and marginal pastures Ramos studies his family in separate chapters, one by one, from the leathery, ignorant father down to the most sympathetic member, the family dog and these chapters somehow seem to be exactly the right length. We share the realities of their lives, including a brush with the law, the experience of winter, huddling around the fireplace and then the overwhelming impact of a town on the two little boys visiting one for the first time, kids who have never seen other people before.

Ramos writes with a satisfying simplicity that seems to reflect perfectly the stripped-down lifestyle of his characters, semi-nomadic hired hands who have to live with the bare minimum of things and aspirations. What sets this book apart from other examples of the social realist Regionalist school of writing of the period, though, is his attention to the characters’ inner lives, their cultural, linguistic and psychological impoverishment apparently mirroring their material poverty. Through a special technique of indirect reported ‘speech-thought’, Ramos seems to dramatise the central rhetorical point of the book: can we really communicate with or understand the experience of these people? Their isolation, brutalisation and verbal clumsiness seem to tell us no; but Ramos’s novel is, like Fabiano’s belief in the power of his wife’s words of hope, an act of faith that we, and they, can break the bounds of a familiar but imprisoning existence and reach beyond.

The final fate of this family, poised between the drought that begins the book and the one that ends it is to continue their trek out of the countryside and into the big city, following in the footsteps of so many other poor Brazilians, then and now. Barren Lives is a moving and deeply sympathetic but grimly unsentimental short book, with a sweet wry touch; an undoubted and enjoyable classic that produced an equally classic screen version by Cinema Novo pioneer Nelson Pereira dos Santos.

Indignant at the injustice, the boy left the house, crossed the yard and took refuge under the dry catingueira trees beside the empty pond.

The dog was his companion in that hour of trial. She had been stretched out beside the stones on which Vitória did the cooking, drowsing in the heat, waiting for a bone. In all probability she wouldn’t get one, but she believed in bones and she found the state of torpor enjoyable. She stirred a bit from time to time, raising to her mistress black eyes shining with confidence. Having accepted the idea that there might be a bone in the kettle, she was not going to let anybody or anything disturb her modest hopes. She got an occasional kick for no reason at all. The kicks were to be expected and did nothing to dispel the vision of the bone. 56