One night, an ancient, dilapidated tugboat leaves a pier in Porto Alegre. Its crew includes four men, one woman, and a dying man. Their destination is the port of Haifa. The purpose of the trip is to allow the dying man to see the city of Jerusalem before he dies. The story of this bizarre and moving expedition is the subject of this novel by Moacyr Scliar.
In the picturesque and noisy Volunta rios da Patria Street, in Porto Alegre, the characters created by Scliar’s imagination come and go. There is Paulo, son of the Portuguese bar owner (a descendant of the Crusaders and a former colonial soldier), Paulo’s friend Benjamim, son of shop owners Ara o and Frima and brother of Nuno, a Jewish gangster, Elvira, the prostitute sister of a priest, Origen, the founder of an unsuccessful sect, Pia-Pouco, a merchant, Cachorra o, Elvira’s pimp, Samir, a Palestinian who opens a shop next to Benjamin’s, and Benjamin, whose dream has always been to live in Jerusalem. That is the Middle East conflict in miniature played out on Voluntarios da Patria Street.
It is a novel that brings together the Quixotes, the gauche, characters who seek the unattainable, Moacyr Scliar’s favorite types from The One-Man Army, The Gods of Raquel, The Centaur in the Garden, A mulher que escreveu a Bíblia (The woman who wrote the Bible), and others.
Here is his incredible crew again, engaged in a clumsy crusade that only the humor of Scliar, one of the greatest contemporary Brazilian writers, could create.
