Caio Abreu

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In eighteen exhilarating stories, Caio Fernando Abreu navigates a Brazil transformed by the AIDS epidemic and stifling military dictatorship of the ’80s. Suspended between fear and longing, Abreu’s characters grasp for connection. A man speckled with Carnival glitter crosses a crowded dance floor and seeks the warmth and beauty of another body. A budding office friendship between two young men grows into a “strange and secret harmony.” One man desires another but fears that their complot might crumble with one clumsy word or gesture. Junkies, failed revolutionaries, poets, and conflicted artists face threats at every turn. But, inwardly ferocious and resilient, they heal. For Abreu there is beauty on the horizon, mingled with the light of memory and decay.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The author of this collection, dead from AIDS this quarter century past, was a Bright Young Thing when the stories collected here appeared forty years ago. He was thirty-four at the time...hardly a stripling, but still in the early stages of Becoming A Writer. The world of 1982 didn't have a lot of openly gay Brazilians, and the specter of AIDS was sending most who might've come out back in to the closet. Not Abreu. Reading this collection, I understand why he started something with these stories, he ignited a kind of votary's flame that burns to light the path for those to come.

But believe you me, there are stories in here that he would've either suppressed or revised heavily were he around to consult on the publication. Things that rang the bell of the 1982 queer world (ask yourself if you even know what "Strawberry Fields" is, still less what it means to the people in 1982) are flat, or worse flat-out bad in the harsher glare of 2022's light. To be expected, of course, since Time is the arbiter of taste in all arts. Not an infallible one either. Structurally there are rules that survive and ones that are flouted so often that the flouting becomes a rule of its own. More often than not, Orthodoxy reasserts itself; the rebels who become pooh-bahs in the New Order resist the next big thing. How many Gertrude Stein imitators are there, versus how many Virginia Woolf wannabes? Time has ruled, Stein is the oddity and Woolf the innovator, both lesbian, neither conventionally inclined. Only one is Canon, though.

So this collection strikes me, at forty years' remove from its birth, as more a Steinian moment than a Woolfesque one.

I shall use the Bryce Method to elucidate my opinion of each piece within the whole over at my blog. There are eighteen stories! Way too much space to take up here.… (altro)