What if you had to choose ten books that are absolutely essential for someone to get to know Moacyr Scliar? Well, journalist and writer Carlos Andre Moreira took on this challenge on the occasion of the author’s death and recently published his choices on Sler. Along with the list, Carlos also gives a brief outline of his relationship with Scliar, when they were editorial colleagues at the newspaper Zero Hora. A must-read that you can check out below or in original publication directly on Sler!
10 BOOKS TO GET TO KNOW THE WORK OF MOACYR SCLIAR
By Carlos André Moreira
Besides reading his work since I was a teenager, I was lucky enough to work with Scliar professionally for a while. First as a staff reporter for Zero Hora. As a columnist for the Living section, Scliar was a frequent visitor to the department, which also housed the team that edited the supplement. He would always stop by to discuss the cover story for that week’s edition and tailor his column to the main story – in that regard, he would literally say he didn’t like very abstract subjects. He was such a fervent admirer of the illustrator who worked on his pages, Bebel Callage, that he didn’t like to write anything that was too vague or didn’t have at least one solid element for the illustrator.
In his books, Scliar has always given the impression of being a gentle humanist. This impression is not always borne out when we meet the writer in the flesh – and, contrary to what the sensitive contemporary crowd addicted to finding triggers for everything thinks, it’s not even about confirming it, the best life of a writer will always be in his books. But in rare cases, the writer himself fully matches the impression you get from reading them. This was the case with Scliar, a gentle man who didn’t shy away from conversation and was a great storyteller. He also talked about things he found interesting in the medical literature he was following (he insisted that if you decided to drink coffee, there was one type that should be avoided at all costs because it was harmful to the heart – unfortunately I can’t remember if it was instant coffee or not, and if I have a heart attack soon, you’ll know I chose the wrong coffee).
I ended up in the Second Section of Zero Hora, and after a while started writing about books. That was when I began to have very frequent contact with Scliar. Well-traveled and extremely well-informed, he would always drop in with a word about something he had seen or read, or to ask if we wanted to talk about something in future issues, or if he could write it himself – and he did. He never missed a deadline, no matter how tight, and had such a way with words that it became legend.
When I tell these anecdotes, I don’t mean to imply that Scliar was my friend. I interviewed him several times, we talked a lot about literature, and although he himself treated me with great and warm familiarity, I always continued to call him “Professor,” a reverence I never gave up, not only for him, but also for other great veterans I met along the way. That’s the point here: Scliar was so kind and approachable that he could make you feel close to him, even if the contact was only professional. He was a warm personality, with always a warm and elegant word.
As we approach these anniversaries scheduled to mark some of the milestones in his career, I felt inspired to pay tribute to Scliar by revisiting a list that was published in the newspaper the day after the author’s death. At that time, the texts about the books had to be quite short due to space constraints. So, I thought it was worth sharing it in a longer, more careful version. Scliar published more than 80 books during his lifetime, more than one a year. Therefore, in the following list, I have omitted copies of his children’s and young adult literature, as well as his collections of columns. The former because I haven’t read everything Scliar has written, and I’m not the best judge of the value of this type of genre, which has its own characteristics – I’m not 10 or 15 anymore, and I’m very happy about that. The second is that I’ve never been a big fan of columns in particular, and I think that in an oeuvre with eight dozen titles, I need to make room for what I consider essential in Scliar’s work. If you’ve never read anything by him, go ahead and read the Columns. If you want to get a better idea of the whole, I think the following selection is more productive. In a corpus as vast as Scliar’s work, it’s one possible approach:
1. A Guerra no Bom Fim (The War in Bom Fim) (L&PM, 1972)
In his first novel, Moacyr Scliar, already an acclaimed short story writer, tells an evocative story of his upbringing. The boy Joel remembers his childhood in the 1940s in the Jewish neighborhood of Bom Fim in Porto Alegre. Scliar borrows from the Jewish oral and literary tradition the bittersweet humor that would become a hallmark of his fiction. At the heart of the novel are the memories of a boy in Bom Fim, almost a village, an immigrant stronghold that evokes the European shtetl in a different setting. The discovery of Joel’s maturity amidst the echoes of the war in Europe gives the book a magical atmosphere that mixes the boy’s childhood experiences with the conflict imagined by the news from Europe. “Bullets whizzed through the air, the Stukas and Messerchimitts rumbled over Capa o da Canoa,” Scliar writes at one point, laying the foundations for his career as a novelist.
2. O exército de um homem só (The One-Man Army) (L&PM, 1973)
A communist in his youth, Scliar creates the protagonist Mayer Guinzburg, “Captain Birobidjan,” his disenchanted version of Quixote, as well as a symbol of the Jewish presence in Brazilian society. A Russian immigrant, Birobidjan arrives in Porto Alegre as an idealistic utopian, preaching the idea of a better world through socialism. As the book progresses, Mayer’s dreams are sidelined by subtle and not-so-subtle concessions to “the system,” to the life expected of an established Jew in his community, to respectable marriage, to the caricatured image of bourgeois stability. Birobidjan first becomes a socialist farmer who lives a communal existence with the animals (the utopian Nova Birobidjan), goes to work behind a counter, becomes a builder, a bankrupt businessman, and finally an abandoned derelict in a boarding house.
3. Os Voluntários (The Volunteers) (L&PM, 1979)
I can’t explain exactly why, since I haven’t reread this book in the last 25 years, but it has been my favorite Moacyr Scliar novel since I was 23. Perhaps because of the picturesque and warm nature of its characters, residents of Voluntários da Pátria Street, in Porto Alegre, who each in their own way represent strands of the lines that have made Brazil and, at the time, opposing sides in the crises of the Middle East. In the midst of a colorful gallery of creatures, the narrative is dominated by the Jewish owners of a small shop on Voluntários da Pátria Street, next to another owned by a Palestinian, Samir. The conflicts, clashes, anger and entanglements between two neighbors and rivals are a mini-representation of various elements of discord between Jews and Palestinians on the wider international stage. On an optimistic note, in the end they all come together in a common Quixotic mission which I won’t say too much about, but which is responsible for bringing together the group of “volunteers” from the title – a reference to the Porto Alegre street occupied not only by run-down stores and a prostitution area that’s still famous today, but also by volunteers from the homeland who actually gave the street its name, having been recruited for the Paraguayan War, many who, needless to say, were not really “volunteers.”
4. O centauro no jardim (The Centaur in the Garden) (Companhia das Letras, 1980)
One of Scliar’s masterpieces, in which he expands the use of the fantastic, found in his previous books, to the realms of fable. In a town in inland Rio Grande do Sul, the fourth child of a Jewish immigrant family is born a centaur. It’s a metaphor for the Jewish condition, the immigrant and the individuality of the collective. Here the author has found what a writer searches for all his life: an original symbolic creation that is used outside the work as a reference for what the image wanted to portray. More than one Jewish friend I have talked to during my life has emphasized how the metaphor of the centaur as a hybrid of two species is also a snapshot of the intrinsic nature of the Jewish immigrant or descendant.
5. A Estranha Nação de Rafael Mendes (The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes) (L&PM, 1983)
Perhaps the most ambitious novel of Scliar’s first phase, both in terms of time (the first long narrative in which Scliar weaves a story that unfolds from biblical times to the 20th century) and theme (this long trajectory is essentially a condensed version of Scliar’s vision of Jewish identity, a perplexed people devoted to a capricious God who seems more interested in punishing them than loving them). The book traces a familiar imaginary line from Jonah, the reluctant prophet who, by disobeying God’s orders, ends up thrown into the sea and swallowed by a whale, through the wanderings of Moshe ben Maimon, a philosopher, scripture scholar and Spanish doctor born in Cordoba in the 12th century, to the Rafael Mendes of the title (Mendes here as a corruption of Maimo nides over the centuries, you see), a doctor living in Porto Alegre who, once a young student full of well-meaning dreams, finds himself middle aged, troubled by his inability to communicate with his wife and daughter, who have joined a New Age sect that seeks to revive the teachings of the Essenes (a group of messianic Jewish dissidents from the second century B.C., who also appeared at the beginning of the book). Perhaps because it encompasses so much, such as Jewish identity, the persecutions of the “strange nation,” corruption, human weakness, religion, and fanaticism, the work has a certain tumultuous feel that makes it hard to fully appreciate.
6. Contos reunidos (Collected stories) (Companhia das Letras, 1995)
In this comprehensive collection, Scliar brings together almost all of his short story production to date, including his best works in the genre, which earned him a prominent role on the national scene, such as “The Ballad of the False Messiah,” “The Pause,” “A House,” “Lavínia,” “Blind Man and Amigo Gedea o Alongside the Highway,” and others. Scliar’s work as a storyteller has some distinctive features that set his short stories apart from his novels. While in the longer pieces Scliar transformed repetitions of structures and mottos into elements of humor, in the short stories he was particularly influenced by Kafka and his concise stories full of meaning, which transform short narratives – some very short – into parables about the human condition. When assembling the stories for the anthology, Scliar didn’t just group them in chronological order, he decided to reorder the works by bringing together in the same section stories that share a certain conceptual or thematic affinity.
7. A mulher que escreveu a Bíblia (The woman who wrote the Bible) (Companhia das Letras, 1999)
The first book in what Scliar called his “biblically themed trilogy.” It’s a story inspired by the essay The Book of J., a 1992 work in which the critic Harold Bloom postulated that the oldest writings in the Bible were written by a woman, the “Javist” (the creator of the literary “character” Yahweh – yes, even atheists recognize that God exists as a literary character, as I’ve said before in this text). Scliar imagines what this woman would be like: cultured and erudite, the unfortunate ugliest concubine in King Solomon’s harem, avoided as much as possible by the king, who is slow to visit her, she dedicates herself, at Solomon’s request, to writing the books that will form the basis of the Torah, the heart of the Old Testament. Endowed with an intelligence as remarkable as her ugliness, the woman, a concubine of unconsummated relations with the king of Israel, is consumed by lustful thoughts and unable to restrain her unbridled language. It was a book in which Scliar used, for the first time, a procedure he would repeat in other biblical reinventions: the transplantation of a contemporary language and mentality to biblical times, making this clash the basis of the primary weirdness of the novel.
8. Os Vendilhões do Templo (Companhia das Letras, 2006)
Scliar returns to the biblical world, this time in a book divided into three parts: in the first, the author describes the episode in which Jesus expels the merchants from the Temple from the point of view of one of them, a kind of protocapitalist with grandiose plans to revolutionize the pigeon trade at the entrance to the Temple of Jerusalem. The story is echoed in the next two parts, one set in Rio Grande do Sul’s missionary period and the other in the present day, in a rural town governed for the first time by a left-wing administration. The protagonist of this third part deals with a dramatic episode in the past, related to a school theater performance, a version of the story of the merchants of the Temple expelled by Jesus.
9. Manual da paixão solitária (Manual of the the solitary passion) (Companhia das Letras, 2008)
The first time I heard Scliar comment on this book was in an interview with me in early 2003. At that time, the book was scheduled for October of that year, under the title “O Irmão de Onan” (“Onan’s Brother”), in the erotic collection that Companhia das Letras was publishing, opening the series with Diário de um Fescenino by Rubem Fonseca. By the time Scliar mentioned the book’s imminent publication in a conversation in the newsroom bar, I had already forgotten about it. According to the author, a first version of the book that had practically already been written, was thrown away because he realized at a certain point that he was telling the story from the wrong point of view. He changed the narrator and finished this book, which won the 2009 Jabuti Award in the Fiction and Best Novel categories. Bringing his biblical trilogy to a close, Scliar tells the story of Onan’s younger brother, the one who inspired the word “onanism” in order not to impregnate his older brother’s wife (when technically, Onan was practicing not “solitary pleasure,” but an ancestral variety of coitus interruptus). With humor, Scliar notes that the real “onanist” in the family was Onan’s youngest brother, though it’s one of Scliar’s books that took me the longest to get used to, due to the formal ingenuity of presenting the story from the point of view of two speakers at a biblical studies conference.
10. Eu vos abraço, milhões (I embrace you, all of you) (Companhia das Letras, 2010)
Scliar returns to Brazil’s past in this novel about the 1930 Revolution, in which he reconstructs the communist utopia in Brazil. The young son of a foreman on a missionary ranch, inspired by the socialist dream instilled in him by a friend, moves to Rio de Janeiro in 1929 to find one of the leaders of the Communist Party and offer his services to the cause of the revolutionary struggle. The leader, however, is a fickle man and difficult to find, leaving the young man to fend for himself. Along the way, he witnesses the effects of the New York Stock Exchange Crash, works as a laborer on the construction of the Christ the Redeemer statue, and sees the revolution led by Getúlio Vargas take to the streets of what was then the Federal Capital. As an unexpected last work of fiction, it represents a synthesis of Scliar’s second phase as a novelist and his unique way of incorporating history into his books.
