Customer Reviews

Blues for a Lost Childhood

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Antonio Torres' 1986 Brazilian novel is stylistically interesting, but despite the rave reviews it received, it never really reaches greatness. It comes across as style over substance. Torres' is among the generation of Brazilian authors whose voice was forged during the 1964-1985 military regime. Self-censorship, obliqueness, wry observation, and double-meanings were their stock in trade. The most interesting element in "Blues for a Lost Childhood" is the strange construction: a nameless self-pitying narrator in a drunken stupor recalling the decline and death of his best friend. Part Hunter S. Thompson and part Dostoevsky. Poems, memories, newspaper articles, dreams, and hallucinations are braided together, the timeline jumping abruptly from sentence to sentence, challenging the reader and setting up a mosaic of... of what? The problem is that, at bottom, there's not much to look at. A pathetic drunken sot wallowing in self-pity and guilt, remembering his childhood, his family ("My father won't help me ever again."), and his dead friend. It's just not very interesting material to build a story around

There are lots of wonderful quotes ("Until I was twenty I believed in Holy Mother Church. Between twenty and thirty, I believed in the Communist Party. From thirty to forty, I believed in Psychoanalysis. Now all I believe in is a full line on a bingo card."), pieces of songs, and half-remembered references to other works. There are interesting observations about Brazil and Brazilians and a fascinating introduction to modern Brazilian literature by translator John Parker. It's all interesting enough, lots of modernistic flash, but ultimately not a great novel.