Hotel Atlantico     by João Gilberto Noll, Translated by David Treece Original title: Hotel Atlântico, Harmada Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Boulevard Books Pub. Date: May 1997 Pub. Place: UK Format: 151 pages ISBN: 1899460659 List Price: $16.95, £8.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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The two novellas that make up this compilation share an identical protagonist and narrative landscape: a nameless, solitary, out-of-work actor endlessly traversing the vast map of Brazil’s interior in search of his and his country’s true centre, and the warmth and familiarity of human society that everywhere seem lost. In a country of such unwieldy dimensions and cultural diversity, where political chaos and economic turmoil make homelessness the perennial condition for millions, the search for continuity, roots, a sense of place and of identity has been a compulsive obsession. Noll’s achievement is to render this powerful, profound allegory of the Brazilian predicament immediately accessible in a cinematic style of rapid but potent images through which familiarity and strangeness, reminiscence and amnesia, meaning and incoherence melt unsettlingly into one another. At the same time his spare, minimalist narrative voice, with its often grotesque self-irony, recalls the tone of the hard-boiled thriller, leading the reader compulsively and relentlessly through his journey into hell and back again.

In the first of the two stories, the protagonist is swept into a doom-laden downward spiral as he is haunted by the imminence of death — from the opening murder at a Rio hotel, through the suicide of a beautiful American fellow-passenger, to his own death on the shores of the Atlantic, following his mysterious amputation and internment in a small-town hospital. The former soap-opera star is reduced to a series of grotesque and disembodied roles that he is obliged to play out with his co-actors — giving the last rites to a dying woman as if he were a messianic seer, or promoting his surgeon’s cynical election campaign as the romantic, invalided chaperon to his compassionate daughter. Only one character — the black nurse whose life’s great desire is to see the ocean — offers a redeeming glimpse of genuine companionship and solidarity, helping him escape the nightmare of the hospital to spend his last moments on the seashore, filling his lungs with the Atlantic’s air.

Harmada finds our anonymous drifter waking up once more, to resume his fitful journey across a dream-like landscape of forests, bars, bus-stations, soup queues and asylums of beggars and orphans. This time, in his painful emergence from the hell of social alienation and anomie, the nameless narrator slowly rediscovers the creative power of language through his vocation as a communicator and artist. Whether as storyteller, preacher, actor or theatre director, it is by voicing, representing and recounting his and other lives that he renders them real, remembered and shared, redeemed from anonymity. At the moving climax of the book his faith in this communicative and redemptive capacity of art is restored to him. The deaf and dumb child shakes him furiously, demanding that he speak. And so, with an unsuspected fluency, he begins to move his hands, inventing, in the silent language of signs, the story of Harmada.

As he reaches the centre of the stage the dumb kid stops and utters the same shout that he’s uttering now, shaking my arms with a strength you would not have suspected him capable of.

Then I wrench my arms away from his hands.

I light a candle.

The kid stops shouting.

I start making signs with my hands. As if I had always been fluent in the language of the deaf.

I tell a long story which unfolds in Persia, filled with knights, monsters, apparitions at every bend in the road...

A terrible thunderbolt severs in two the child in its mother’s arms. The white horse whinnies, in the distance a purplish glow in the sky.

Swashbucklers are hanging by a thread in their duel on the castle walls.

The long lost lady walks into the lake. She drowns. At the bottom of the water she discovers that death is a dream, when beings with no precise anatomy surround her and invite her to take part in a black feast of pebble soft with slime.

The vicissitudes of the hero are so many that the kid sometimes seems to be surrounded by a great selection of treats, not knowing which of them to concentrate on.

Suddenly I feel my hands turning numb with tiredness.

I take my handkerchief out of my pocket.

I wipe the sweat from my hands.

Day is breaking.»