Jubiabá     by Jorge Amado, Translated by Margaret A. Neves Original title: Jubiabá Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Avon Pub. Date: 1984 Pub. Place: USA Not available for ordering

Jubiabá is the story of black Antônio Balduíno, a boxer — with the knack of flattening any white challenger — who gets dressed after bouts in the public urinal in the town square...

Pitched into the world as an orphan, Antônio’s life is a fine-grained picture of the life of the Brazilian ‘underclass’ in the time between the world wars. Growing up in a shanty town perched above the city, as a boy he dreams of conquering a life for himself in the excitement and riches it seems to promise. Highly talented as a song-writer, pugilist and lover his life seems ever on the point of becoming a splendid Hollywood-style success story. Amado makes it clear though that Antônio’s blackness (and his poverty) means that things always fall apart and he ends up slaving away on a tobacco plantation, with everything taken from him.

Even those who are emotionally connected to him, his brothers in petty crime, the blond girl of good family, Lindalvina, he adored as a poor black family servant, end up badly and sadly.

At the end of the book Amado tries to persuade us that Antônio achieves redemption on the personal level as a kind godfather to Lindalvina’s orphaned child and, politically, as a militant strike leader but this seems like a sentimental (Soviet-style) ‘studio ending’ to a book that explores lived poverty in a detail that very few great writers have managed. In fact this portrait of poverty and exclusion is a notable achievement.

‘they...sleep in the sandhills above the docks, looking at the enormous ships, the stars in the sky, and the mysterious green sea’