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.

Vanessa Barbara is a journalist, translator and writer. Her publications include O livro amarelo do terminal (2008), winner of the Jabuti Award, the novel O verão do Chibo (2008), co-written with Emilio Fraia, and the children’s book Endrigo, o escavador de umbigo (2011), illustrated by Andrés Sandoval. She recently published a translation of The Great Gatsby. Barbara also edits the literary website A Hortaliça and is a columnist for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. ‘Lettuce Nights’ (‘Noites de alface’) is an extract from her forthcoming novel. 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 – Vanessa Barbara is introduced by previous Best of Young British Novelist, Rachel Seiffert.

A story that starts with a bereavement: already I’m drawn in. The real story is always in the aftermath, and here’s a young writer who not only understands that, but expresses it with tender humour too. So it’s the socks that miss Ada first; Otto notices them swollen in mourning, untended in the wash. The tone has been set, wry and gentle, even in the first paragraph, and we’ve been taken straight into that intimate, domestic space expressive of a long and contented marriage.

It’s a sad start, but there’s contentment for the reader here too: the particular satisfaction offered by a well-turned first chapter. Unhappily for Otto, his wife is now gone; happily for us, these are but the opening pages of a novel-in-progress, full of the promise of more to come, in good time, beyond this issue of Granta.

Otto and Ada, we are told, decided early on not to have children. Their life had to do with each other, and with those who lived around them. Inward-looking Otto took shelter behind his garrulous Ada; the kind of woman who would welcome a delivery boy into the living room and draw out his life story over coffee. Otto has his neighbours now, but he has his memories too – which should he choose? In this widower’s dilemma lies all the potential energy of a narrative ready to unfold.

Oh, and it has to do with cauliflowers too . . . – Rachel Seiffert, Best of Young British Novelist in 2003

Lettuce Nights

When Ada died, the wash hadn’t dried yet. The trousers’ elastic waistbands were still damp, socks swollen, T-shirts hanging the wrong way out. A rag was left soaking in the bucket. Rinsed recycling bins in the sink, the bed unmade, open biscuit packets lying on the couch. Ada had gone away without watering the plants. The household things were holding their breath and waiting. Since then, the house without Ada has been nothing but empty drawers.

Otto and Ada were married in 1958, just as the town was transitioning between mayors. They bought a yellow house and decided not to have children, no dogs or cats, not even a pet turtle. They spent almost fifty years together: cooking, assembling massive puzzles of European castles and playing ping-pong on the weekends, until arthritis set in and made the game impossible. In the end it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between their tone of voice, their laugh, their way of walking. Ada was thin with short hair and liked cauliflower. Otto was thin with short hair and liked cauliflower. They wandered up and down the hallways and took out the rubbish together. Ada dealt with the various household details and did most of the chores while Otto followed her around telling anticlimactic stories. They were such good friends that Ada’s death left a silence in the hallways of the yellow house.

Translated by Katrina Dodson.

To continue reading this story you can pre-order a copy of The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists, which is available in stores on 8 November, or earlier if you subscribe.

On 5 July Granta announced the first ever list of twenty Best of Young Brazilian Novelists. The collection is currently available in Portuguese to be translated into English and published in November by Granta and in Spanish and Chinese by our international partners next year. Here we asked three Best of Young Brazilians – Daniel Galera, Vanessa Barbara and Chico Mattoso – for their own list of three essential books by Brazilian authors to find out which writers of past generations inspire them the most.

Daniel Galera

Many Brazilian authors played an important role in my life as a reader, and curiously two of them, João Gilberto Noll and Hilda Hilst, write in a prose style that is very lyrical, sensual and full of metaphysical weight, whereas my own style is more straightforward, realist or merely physical. I would mention A fúria do corpo by Noll and Fluxo-Floema by Hilst as two particularly intense works.

A fúria do corpo (The fury of the body), by João Gilberto Noll

In this novel an unnamed character moves aimlessly around a seedy Rio de Janeiro facing unusual and sometimes shocking situations. There’s almost no plot and the unifying element is the human body, which goes through a journey of pleasure and decay. Noll’s nameless, drifting kind of characters sometimes appear in my own writing. In other books he describes my home city Porto Alegre in a personal way that appeals to me.

Fluxo-Floema (Flux-Phloem), by Hilda Hilst

This was Hilda Hilst’s first book of prose after establishing herself as a poet. Her narrators see death, mystery and eroticism in the world’s simplest details and rant beautifully about it. The flow of her sentences never fails to impress me. The metaphysical probing and the rejection of plot in her work are more radical than Noll’s, but somehow she’s able to go on and on and keep the book gripping and readable. I never tried to imitate her – that would make no sense – but she inspired me to develop my own style to the limit.

Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) by João Guimarães Rosa

Finally, I can’t help mentioning Grande Sertão: Veredas by João Guimarães Rosa. I was already twenty-two years old when I read it – already a self-published author – and the experience went way beyond my highest expectations. I´m not sure I can say anything really new about this which is considered by many the greatest Brazilian novel ever published. It´s a Faustian epic of awe-inspiring scope. In terms of language and mythical quality, it stands for the Brazilian inland of the ‘sertão’ as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for the American West. A difficult, weird, true and timeless novel.

All three books are written in one single, long section without breaks or paragraphs (in the case of ‘Fluxo-Floema’, each of the five ‘stories’ is a section of its own), which may or may not have to do with the effect they had on me as a reader. I really can’t tell. They didn’t directly influence my own writing style, but their fearlessness left a mark on me. They remind me to try to go all the way.

Vanessa Barbara

Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas), by Machado de Assis

This is a memoir written by a dead man with a good sense of humour and mediocre character, who may be dead but is still the narrator, so you have to respect him. After all, ‘frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man’. Considered a serious classic author in Brazil (you have to read him at school), Machado de Assis wasn’t as serious as it seemed. His novel is strangely amusing and has a subversive style, unusual chapters and a unique voice. It is dedicated ‘to the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse’ and is wonderfully written. I always laugh out loud in some passages, even knowing them by heart. He’s my favourite Brazilian writer, often compared to Lawrence Sterne, Kurt Vonnegut and Samuel Beckett.

Excerpt: For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place.

Grande Sertão: Veredas (Great Backlands: Tracks), by Guimarães Rosa

If Machado de Assis is our Lawrence Sterne, then Guimarães Rosa is our James Joyce. Grande Sertão is a difficult novel, full of neologisms and a peculiar rhythm, situated in the remote and arid backlands of Brazil. The main character is Riobaldo, an urban middle class man who ends up as an outlaw, and his concealed love for Diadorim, another ‘jagunço’.

Excerpt: The hours were endless. The sun was pouring down on the back of our necks. The sun, the burning sun, under which I sweated; my hair was wet, and the inside of my clothing, and I had an itch in the middle of my back; parts of my body were numb. I kept on shooting.

A Lua Vem da Ásia (The Moon Comes from Asia), by Campos de Carvalho

This is a relatively unknown novel from a relatively unknown writer. A Lua Vem da Ásia is narrated by a man who thinks he’s in a concentration camp that he formerly thought was a luxury hotel. ‘I cannot tell whether it is in Europe or in Asia, or even in Polynesia.’ He seems obviously crazy and is actually locked in a mental institution, but there’s logic in his insanity. The prose is satirical, pessimist and yet profound. In a quick and eccentric style, he describes his pathetic attempts to make sense of his life, a random succession of absurd events. It’s a fragmentary shattered novel, constructed by a chaotic mind.

Excerpt: At sixteen I killed my Logic professor. Claiming self-defense – and what defense might be more legitimate? – I was found innocent by five votes against two and went to live under a bridge over the Seine, even though I was never in Paris. I let my beard grow full in my mind, bought a pair of glasses for short-sightedness and spent the nights stargazing, a cigarette between my fingers.

Chico Mattoso

Contos (Short stories), by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis is best known for amazing novels such as Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro, but few people outside Brazil are aware of the greatness of his short stories. He could easily be placed on a level with masters like Chekhov, Maupassant, or Hemingway. Machado had a great eye for detail and was a sharp and sophisticated observer of the human condition, and these qualities somehow seem to be refined in his short stories. They are funny and sombre, delicate and cruel; to read them is a constant delight. Machado is always giving me lessons on style, intelligence, subtlety and wit. His wild inventiveness knows no boundaries. I can’t recommend him enough.

Angústia (Anguish), by Graciliano Ramos

Angústia is one of those novels that not only moves or compels you, but can make you physically sick. Graciliano Ramos is a master of post-modern realism. Some critics have described this book (which was published in 1936) as ‘existentialist avant la lettre’. Graciliano brings us to the hell of subjectivity, to its most dreadful demons. Everything in this unsettling novel exudes pain and misery – but there is also space for moments of surprising lyricism. The book’s brilliant use of stream of consciousness amazes me every time I read it, and the last pages’ monologue is one of the most beautiful – and sad – pieces of fiction I have ever read. There are no wasted words in Graciliano’s books. All of his sentences are like daggers that stab you directly in the heart.

Três Mulheres de Três PPPês (Three Women of Three P’s), by Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes

I don’t think this book has had proper recognition in Brazil yet. To me it is one of the most brilliant works of Brazilian fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. Paulo Emilio was a film critic who started to write fiction in his late years. This book – his first novel – was written when he was in his 60s, and is a masterpiece. Its apparent simplicity hides a kaleidoscopic – and hilarious – investigation of São Paulo’s snobbish and vulgar upper class during the 1940s. The book is comprised of three novellas whose protagonists – all named Polydoro, hence the title – are men who suffer in the hands of powerful and manipulative women. Três Mulheres has an amazing freedom of style and yet it sounds miraculously composed. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to start writing immediately. ■

You can read the full list of Best of Young Brazilian Novelists here and an interview with the editor of Granta em português and one of the seven judges for the selection process, Marcelo Ferroni here.