To coincide with the launch this week of Granta’s latest issue, Betrayal, we asked contributors from the issue to define the word. Following this piece we asked our Best of Young Brazilian Novelists for their definitions.

Antônio Xerxenesky

Betrayal. For me, the word comes from Betrayal at Krondor. The first time I heard this word in its English form was when I had to install the many floppy disks that contained the RPG (role playing game) Betrayal at Krondor on my 386 PC. The year was 1994, and I was ten years old. I had to check an English/Portuguese dictionary: ‘Betrayal’ meant traição. So that was betrayal: in a magical realm, assassins and elves were involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the king. Or something like that. With my poor knowledge of English at the time, I had to forge a story in my mind. Betrayal had nothing to do with being cheated by your girlfriend or deceived by your best friend. It had nothing to do with finding yourself utterly alone for a moment. Nothing to do with living in a country where, not so long ago, the military took over and trampled over the freedom of citizens. No. Betrayal had to do with pixels. Pixels and kings. Oh, and goblins too. Yeah, definitely goblins.

Emilio Fraia

Foie Gras

I got the feeling, quack, that we’ve seized the castle, quack-quack, that the banging of pans is ours, that we’re in more than we’ve ever been, that this one at the kitchen, knife in his hand, quack, he’s gonna help us, yes, that these onions and tomatoes, quack-quack, all of that, is our plan working out.

Julián Fuks

Betrayal, you say, and I immediately conceive a precise ensemble of damned acts – the impeccable wife disappearing into the night, the stout pocket of the politician, the soldier deserting his country, the mother abandoning her child. It’s not my fault, I tell myself. That’s what the world taught me in its eloquent pedagogy, made of rules and rites, illustrated with news and fictions. Thereby I exempt myself for a while, I breathe quietly, and allow myself to forget the minor or grander betrayals the world doesn’t damn – the husband misplacing his caress, the honest guy minimizing his taxes, the country that condemns its citizens to exile, the stubborn and incessant cry of a baby.

Vinicius Jatoba

And there’s no other treason worse, said the old man, than not to meet at the other side of your own lengthy struggle the face your dream promised you that you would have, and you should have, as you recall, almost daily, the path chosen, and it keeps coming, the treason, the broken promise, each time your own face stares at you from the other side of the mirror. And you live your life as if from the other riverbed, said the old man, every step misleading, and reinforcing, until there’s an end and you’re old because the end is being old, and you can cherish conversations with young lads, who listen because thanks to the arrogance of being young, they assure themselves they will make it all right, so they listen to avoid ending their life as the old man, they proclaim while listening respectfully, as if they care. But you will fail too, said the old man, you will fail. Not because of me or any other person you know or you will ever meet, said the old man. You will fail as while being so sure you deserve better, you are your own snake, my dear boy, like everyone else. You will fail.

Vanessa Barbara

Betrayal is not when your husband spends a few nights with a girl you know, nor when he returns home and you ask happily if it was fun (‘yes’, he said, ‘very much’). Betrayal is when he talks about it to a bunch of his friends, including some of your closest, and everyone knows the details while you spend forty-two days trying so hard to find out what the hell is going on. Betrayal is when the one who is supposed to protect you decides to hurt you and there’s no one left to speak in your defence. It’s when men are brave enough to brag about their acts to one another, but no boldness is left to speak frankly to their wives. Even when we beg. Betrayal is when you left home to live on your own and within two weeks he’s sleeping with other women in the bed you bought together – your picture still hanging on the wall, smiling blankly at your substitute.

Laura Erber

A fly betrays nothing and nobody, neither a frog nor a hippopotamus. Its happiness and consolation are different. But we who are animals that talk and are full of confusion and false promises betray day after day as soon as we say ‘I’. This is such a daily betrayal that it isn’t even noticed. Who cares? But nothing is as inconstant and unreliable as pronouns. And if to err is human and if it’s wrong to betray, then betraying our own inconstancy is the most tortuous path towards our daily madness. That’s more or less what Wittgenstein meant when he said that the language of each day is in itself true madness.

Miguel Del Castillo

There is an acceptable kind of betrayal, one that people crave (mostly in the subconscious): architectural betrayal. In a faithful marriage, partners often have confidence to show each other even the undesirable parts of themselves (which theoretically the other is willing to deal with). In good architecture, though, there is betrayal. You don’t want to know what buildings really are like underneath. You don’t want to participate in their conspiracies. Some architects are still worried about the so-called ‘structural truth’ (buildings should show how they stand: pillars, beams etc.). But nobody wants to live inside a Pompidou. It is nice to go there once in a while and see how it all works, but it may be tough to go to Pompidou-like bathrooms every day. Picture yourself seeing your flush going down through transparent tubes, or imagining if electricity is really making its way through the pipes above. No, what you need is to know that everything is clean, beautiful, working. This is not merely a domestic issue: to be ‘truthful’ in architecture proves most of the times to be uninventive and plain, creating lifeless constructions. Swiss architect Peter Zumthor says buildings are like violins: you don’t see their inside structures, you might not even have a clue on how they were made, but the sound they make touches you deep inside. In architecture, this sound, he says, is called atmosphere. Architecture’s greatest betrayal.

Photo by Markles55.

Today granta.com is delighted to launch The Best Untranslated Writers Series in which established writers select and showcase fellow writers from their own languages who are not yet widely translated or read. As the ongoing series progresses Santiago Roncagliolo, Edwidge Danticat, Valeria Luiselli, Etgar Keret, Miroslav Penkov and many others will illuminate a host of untranslated writers, and in doing so, blind spots we didn’t know we had. We begin with three of our Best of Young Brazilian Novelists, Michel Laub, Laura Erber and Ricardo Lísias who give introductions to the work of Brazilians Daniel Pellizzari, André Sant’Anna and José Luiz Passos respectively.

Photo by Fernanda Rudmer.

Michel Laub on Daniel Pellizzari

Daniel Pellizzari’s fiction breaks away from the lineage of the literature that’s most typically produced in Brazil today – particularly the realism of terse prose – replacing it with a sometimes delirious mixture of burlesque, parody, inside jokes and encyclopaedism, among other elements.

One of his stories, Tanso, is the only story I know of that is written in a kind of dialect typical of Porto Alegre, the city in which he (and I) grew up. Dedo negro com unha (Black Finger with Nail), his only novel, is described as ‘an epic farce containing the most abstract, debatable, magical, amusing misfortunes ever to have taken place from the beginnings of time.’ It is the story of four boys who find a partially mummified finger in a sand pit. Some years later, dozens of pilgrims make the journey there to join a cult of the dismembered digit.

The translator into Portuguese of authors such as David Foster Wallace, Irving Welsh and Jeffrey Eugenides, Pellizzari wrote the text to the graphic novel Furry Water, which is being drawn by the award-winning Brazilian graphic artist Rafael Grampá and will be published by Dark Horse Comics. He has also completed a new novel, Digam a satã que o recado foi endendido (Tell Satan the Message Has Been Understood), about three immigrants and an Irishman who set up an agency running tours of the haunted sites of Dublin. The plot involves an apocalyptic sect that shelters runaway juveniles and a group of ‘poetic terrorists’ from Trinity College.

Laura Erber on André Sant’Anna

For me, the writing of André Sant’Anna (b.1964) is among the most truly exciting in the contemporary Brazilian literary landscape. Essentially he deals with vicious thoughts, with the crushing of desire, but rather than doing this with a distanced, judgmental eye, he penetrates perversely right into the mud of the character’s mind. His literary subject, is the inauthentic; that is, his favourite characters are always the product of a fanatical, insane identification with pre-established social models – whether the bandit, the playboy, or the employee at the ad agency who’s afraid of his boss. Sant’Anna shows us the madness that is in banality, and though it seems to be a paradox – that’s precisely his power. The text installs itself in the head of the uncouth, and manages to extract two things that are utterly fantastic: the wealth of idiocy, and the idiocy of wealth. Whether in the stories of Amor (Love, 1998) and Sexo (Sex, 1999) or in the novel O paraíso é bem bacana (Paradise Is Really Cool, 2006), it’s as though he were filming – but with a microscope, rather than a camera – the emerging of prejudice, at the exact moment when a thought begins to turn over onto itself, just as the protagonist starts to cleave to their worst. It’s all pretty tragic, and the laughter these narratives provoke in the reader is undoubtedly a terrible sort of laughter.

Ricardo Lísias on José Luiz Passos

Of the Brazilian writers who have begun to be published in recent years, José Luiz Passos is one of the most compelling. His two novels, Nosso grão mais fino (Our Finest Grain) and O sonâmbulo amador (The Amateur Sleepwalker, published this year) deal with the difficult construction of memory, through a language that is always careful and original.

Nosso grão mais fino takes place in Brazil’s sugar-producing north-east, the setting of many of our finest novels. Here, however, the grandeur of physical labour is replaced by an atmosphere of decadence. Brazil is already being transformed into an urban country and the rural world is becoming debased. Obviously the blow being struck isn’t exclusively an economic one: the book centres on affecting relationships that are tense and fractured, between people who are watching the world go to ruin.

The relationship between two brothers is reconstructed by one of them, who is trying to understand the family’s past, while struggling with his own amorous dilemmas. If he is unable to assemble the pieces of his familial relationships, then love, too, is about to be smashed apart, as is the whole of the narrator’s universe. The reader is kept breathless throughout.

O sonâmbulo Amador reproduces the notebooks of a man who, as in the previous book, is trying to make sense of his memories. Here the setting is a psychiatric clinic. The historical moment has been accelerated a little, too, and we are now the midst of a military dictatorship, in a dream-environment – or a nightmare one!

Amid such constructions, José Luiz Passos’s carefully-wrought, artistically well-tended language ends up making his books even stronger. They are high-impact texts – as well as being the best pieces of work that have been in the new Brazil. ■

Translated by Daniel Hahn.

Laura Erber was born in Rio de Janeiro, and is a visual artist and a writer of short stories, essays and poetry. Her four books of poetry include Os corpos e os dias (2008), which was shortlisted for the Jabuti Award. She has collaborated with Italian writer Federico Nicolao on the book Celia Misteriosa (2007) and with artist Laercio Redondo on the video project The Glass House (1999–2008), and has exhibited her work across Europe and Brazil. Her book on the Romanian theorist and poet Ghérasim Luca is forthcoming this December. Erber is currently working on her first novel, Os esquilos de Pavlov, to be published in 2013. ‘That Wind Blowing through the Plaza’ (‘Aquele vento na praça’) is a new story. Here, as part of an ongoing series on the twenty authors from The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists issue – which was first published in Portuguese by Objectiva – Laura Erber is introduced by previous Best of Young American Novelist Dara Horn.

Do yourself a favour: do not read Laura Erber’s ‘That Wind Blowing through the Plaza’ only once. If you do, you might imagine that you’ve just read an aimless story about an artist who meets a senile old man. But when you read it again, you will plunge into a rabbit hole that leads to the looming question of the purpose of art.

Erber’s narrator goes to Romania to buy works by the actual artist Paul Neagu, a sculptor whose dance on the boundary of art and life included inventing alter egos whom he passed off as actual artists. In Erber’s story, Neagu’s works are being hoarded by a former French Cultural Institute janitor named Stefan Ptyx – whose name is an ancient Greek word referring to a folded writing tablet, and who may or may not be a double of the dead Neagu. The demented Ptyx owns a complete set of Balzac’s novels and spends his days copying them out, word for word. The novels were given to him by ‘a Mr. Barthes’ – that is, Roland Barthes, the literary theorist whose central work is a book-length copy of a Balzac story, analyzed line by line. (Barthes actually did teach in Romania, adding to the braid of reality and fiction.) Ptyx lives in the Romanian countryside, near where Prometheus was punished for stealing fire from the gods. One could write a Barthes-worthy analysis of every phrase in Erber’s story. Or perhaps that would give it no more meaning than Ptyx’s copying of Balzac in his happy resistance to mortality. Or would it?

Erber is a visual artist, and one senses here the wrenching disconnect between the physical world and art that pretends to represent it. ‘I wanted to show that language is an intensely physical force,’ Erber once wrote of her artwork. In this story, among the flies and the beets and a girl’s fragrant hair, one touches a reality that seems divorced from any artist’s glorious attempt to wrest fire from the gods. Beneath every detail is a profound and raw truth: the agony of mourning, and the strange freedom it allows. To the mourner, the world can seem meaningless, but also liberated from the burden of meaning – less grotesque than picaresque. Or as Erber’s narrator puts it, in words that seem an apt description of both art and life itself, ‘None of it made up a web of significance. Nothing guaranteed that life was more than a collection of fake men and copied novels.’

No, there is no guarantee. But in Erber’s hands, it feels real.

That Wind Blowing through the Plaza

I didn’t go for the dental treatment, or for the gypsy dancing, or for the tuicâ, or for Bran Castle. Nor did I go to settle old scores, to do genealogical searches or to buy rare copies of avanguardea literarea romaneasca. I wasn’t interested in the breeze over the Dâmboviţa River, the nocturnal song of the strigoi or the wildlife in the Danube Delta. I went because I was asked to, and I met Martina. The bestsmelling locks in the East, the Caravaggio-esque locks of Martina Ptyx. They confused and attracted me.Was it a fetish? Maybe. But none of that matters much now. I went to Bucharest for Neagu’s boxes, I met Martina and returned with old Stefan’s things.

Last Thursday, at age 66, the
Romanian-born artist Paul Neagu,
a resident of Holloway, in the north
of London, passed away. Born in
Bucharest in 1938, he moved to the
British capital in the seventies. A fan of
bicycling, yoga and swimming, Neagu
liked to show off his enviable physical
form in arduous performances that he
had named post-apocalyptic rituals. Still,
in the last years of his life he faced many
health problems, aggravated by his
excessive consumption of coffee and
unfiltered cigarettes. In 1989, his sister
gave him a kidney. He was stubborn and
persistent: the more his illnesses spread,
the more monumental his sculptures
became. Under Victor Brancusi’s
influence – and perhaps that of his
father, a shoemaker who specialized
in women’s footwear – he moved from
painting to three-dimensional forms.
In his famous series of sculptures
Hyphen, he represented the geometric
trinity made by a triangle, a square
and a spiralling circle. He studied that
sacred geometry intensely, to the point
of believing that basic forms determine
all aspects of life. In 1969, he met
Richard Demarco, who introduced him
to Tadeusz Kantor and Joseph Beuys,
with whom he later became great
friends. To get by in London, he taught
at various art schools (Hornsey, Slade,
Chelsea, Royal College of Art), where
artists like Antony Gormley, Anish
Kapoor and Rachel Whiteread took his
classes. In 2001, he had a stroke that
affected his speech, but all the same he
continued to work and to communicate
his ideas. In 2003, the Tate did a show
commemorating the acquisition of an
important part of his body of work.
Neagu was seen for the last time on the
night of the opening with an iridescent
silk kerchief tied around his neck.

Translated by Anna Kushner.