Não Falei

by Beatriz Bracher, Adam Morris (Translator)

Narrado na primeira pessoa, este romance de Beatriz Bracher tem como protagonista um professor que as vésperas de mudar de cidade, se põe a refletir sobre o período da luta armada no Brasil dos anos 60 e 70 e as contradições que daí resultaram para o país e para sua vida.

Genres: Fiction, Brazil, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Politics

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Beatriz Bracher é uma escritora e roteirista brasileira.

Foi uma das fundadoras da Editora 34, na qual trabalhou de 1992 até 2000. Também editou a revista 34 Letras, especializada em literatura e filosofia, entre os anos de 1988 e 1991.

Escreveu o argumento do filme Cronicamente Inviável (2000) e os roteiros de Os Inquilinos (2009, prêmio de melhor roteiro no Festival do Rio) e O Abismo Prateado (2011).

Seu livro Antônio, de 2007, ficou em terceiro lugar no Prêmio Jabuti, na categoria romance. Além disso, foi o segundo colocado no Prêmio Portugal Telecom de Literatura e finalista do Prêmio São Paulo de Literatura3 4 . Em 2009, recebeu o Prêmio Clarice Lispector pela coletânea de contos Meu Amor.

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Look, I was tortured, and they say I snitched on a comrade who was later killed by soldiers’ bullets. I didn’t snitch — I almost died in the room where I could have snitched, but I didn’t talk. They said I talked and Armando died, I was released two days after his death and they let me stay on as the school principal.
 
Beatriz Bracher's Não Falei was published in Brazil in 2004 on the 40th anniversary of the 'Golpe de 64' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Br...), the US backed military coup that overthrew the democratic government and ushered in two decades of dictatorship.

As 'I didn't talk', it has been brought to us in English translation in 2018, by Adam Morris and New Directions Press.
 
The novel is also set in 2004 and narrated by Gustavo, now 64 and looking back on an incident from 1970. Peripherally involved with the resistance movement to the dictatorship he was arrested and tortured. Subsquently his childhood best friend Armando, also his brother-in-law, who was active in the armed resistance, was arrested and shot, while Gustavo was later released without charge. Gustavo's wife Eliana, Armando's brother, died soon afterwards in exile in Paris, from pneumonia, and (from grief?), leaving Gustavo to bring up their daughter alone.

Gustavo is haunted by the suspiscion that, under torture, he betrayed Armando, something he refutes. As the novel opens he has just retired from his job as an educator, and preparing to move out of the family home. As he prepares to leave and packs, memories are triggered and he feels inclined to tell his story - indeed he is urged to by Cecilia a young aspiring novelist who wants to use his experiences for a novel based on the early days of the resistance. Except such a simple thing isn't really possible.

If it's possible to have a thought without a word or an image, without time and space - complete, created by me, a revelation of what remains hidden in me (and from me) but suddenly appears, if it could be born so clearly for all to see, without origin, without any effort of breath, of tone of voice, of rhythm or hesitation, without vision even, emerging like a normal thought, or more than a thought; a thing - if such a thing could exist, then I'd like to tell a story.

Instead, what we get in this slim but dense 150 page novel is a much more fractured tale. His thoughts are interspersed with other sources - his notes on his theories of pedagogy, diaries of his sister, recollections of his parents, literary passages and a semi-autobiographical novel written by his elder brother Jose, one where Jose unashamedly mimics other authors notably Machado de Assis

He wrote of reminiscing and I think of creating; he wrote of discovering and I need to be establishing. ... His Machadian tone — which José cultivates in a way that borders on plagiarism yet somehow remains, paradoxically, his own — revived my happiness in the same way that, when absorbed in some specific and complex composition, we’re surprised by the sound of birdsong.
[...]
“This is what happens to me, as I go about remembering and shaping the construction or reconstruction of myself” (Machado, as written by Jose)
 
"As I go about remembering", what a beautiful thing. I need to reread Machado, retrieve the unexpected things I no longer remember. Unlike José, who tries like Dom Casmurro to construct a past that will be kind to him in the present, I look for my errors, I kick stones and send the cockroaches running, I walk through spiderwebs that spread across my face and ask every smug milestone I’ve passed, What purpose do you serve in my life? Did you manage to hold firm, emit light, make noise, serve at least as a pillar to sustain the person who made you, or are you already so spoiled by applause that the flick of a finger could send you tumbling over a cliff into the calm and muddy river of the satisfied?
 
Machado's Dom Casmurro with its subjective and distrusting narrator also serves as a model here - except here the suspiscions of Gustavo are trained on himself.

Language plays a key role in both Gustavo's life and theories as an educator but also the novel:

I was always favorable to the presence, in every classroom, of a Portuguese dictionary, an etymological dictionary, a Latin dictionary, a Greek dictionary, a common grammar, and a dictionary of verb and prepositional correspondences. And not in some corner of the room, but on my desk, to be handled at all times, without formality.
[...]
The old play on words—traduttore, traditore—takes its meaning not merely from the phonetic similarity between the two words, or the deeper meaning it gives to the act of translation. The similarity is simple and it’s right there in the root of the words, both of which refer to act of passing from one side to another. We know that this going–over is never innocent and that nothing that crosses over can ever come back unharmed.
 
Etymology is particularly important and tribute here must be paid to Morris's excellent translation, smoothly discussing the Portuguese language in English.

I did have one minor gripe here though. 1970 was also the year of Brazil's 3rd and most famous World Cup win and football - both the Brazilian national team and Pele's Santos - feature throughout. But this was the least convincing part of the novel - I never really believed the narrator actually followed football - and I suspect the, otherwise excellent, translation was responsible. A female friend who “never got to the point of understanding the championship brackets, or keeping up with the scuttlebutt”, games analysed as “a sequence of plays” and fans “rattling off the entire roster” might work when describing basketball or American football but sounds unconvincing applied to football (as indeed does the term soccer).

There is a lot in the book on education. One excellent passage talks about how academic disciplines embed their past histories and disputes in their language:

Every discipline has its own specific procedures, creating according to its needs. And I'm not referring to the theoretical bias of a particular school, but to the slice of reality that each branch of knowledge sets out to create. This slice obliges us to use a certain language, to establish its names and necessary procedures so that through it we can get closer. There's already a story in motion, its false starts and deviations the results of ancient battles that today are meaningless, but language continues to carry the names we are in fact obliged to use if we wish to have our thoughts included in the common chain.

I wasn't trained for any special chain, I was never part of any of the organisations, and I had to guess at the correct knowledge.

except, neatly, the last part - the lack of training he refers to - links back to the novel's main subject matter. As a peripheral figure Gustavo had not been trained, unlike Armando, for what to do and say under torture (he later finds the keys include: giving up credible information but which you know is already known by the torturers; naming those who aren't really involved - like Gustavo himself; and disassembling and resisting long enough - 3-4 days- for the key figures to go into hiding).

But spotting this link was the exception not the rule for me. In his review by GR friend enricocioni (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) comments that he had to re-read carefully to follow the threads, and still feels he needs another read to figure it all out. I've yet to do that and at times, as Gustavo remarks about watching others getting emotional, we see and feel the heat of combustion but are not a part of it.   

Towards the end of his musing Gustavo realises: Maybe no one has ever considered me a traitor except myself. 

An excellent review (H/T again to enricocioni)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/r...
 
And an interview with the translator:
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog...
 
3.5 stars - rounded down to 3, although that reflects my reading experience more than what is clearly an impressive book (and the dodgy 'soccerball').
 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Appendix: Asymptote Book Club

The book first came to my attention via the excellent Asymptote Book Club (https://www.asymptotejournal.com/book...), which I would highly recommend: the Asymptote Journal team select a piece of world literature each month from some of the leading independent presses in Canada, the US, and the UK.

Their review/introduction to this novel:
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog...

And the list of books to date:

13. The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga, tr. Jordan Stump, published by Archipelago Books
(my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
12. Hotel Tito, by Ivana Simić Bodrožić, tr. Ellen Elias-Bursać, published by Seven Stories Press
(my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
11. Oct-18 Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan tr. Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi, published by Seven Stories
(my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
10. Sep-18 Moving Parts by Prabda Yoon, tr. Mui Poopoksakul , published by Tilted Axis Press
(my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
9. Aug-18 Revenge of the Translator by Brice Matthieussen, tr. Emma Ramadan, published by Deep Vellum
8. Jul-18 I Didn't Talk by Beatriz Bracher, tr. Adam Morris. published by New Directions
(my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
7. Jun-18 The Tidings of the Trees by Wolfgang Hilbig, tr. Isabel Fargo Cole, published by Two Lines Press
(my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
6. May-18 The Chilli Bean Paste Clan by Yan Ge, tr. Nicky Harmon, published by Balestier Press
5. Apr-18 Brother in Ice by Alicia Kopf, tr. Mara Faye Letham, published by And Other Stories
4. Mar-18 Trick by Dominico Starnone tr. Jhumpa Lahiri, published by Europa Editions
3. Feb-18 Love by Hanne Ørstavik, tr. Martin Aitken, published by Archipelago Books
2. Jan-18 Aranyak: Of the Forest by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, tr. Rimli Bhattacharya, published by Seagull Books
1. Dec-17 The Lime Tree by César Aira, tr. Chris Andrews, published by And Other Stories

[enricocioni · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a long time to finish this one! It's 150 pages of stream of consciousness, and rich in complex ideas about memory and family and education and language and who knows what else, so it requires a degree of focus that I was only able to give it the last two days, re-reading the parts I'd managed to read over the past three weeks, then finishing it, this time armed with a pencil to underline key information and ideas, as a kind of anchor. And even now, I feel like I need to read it at least once more in order to figure it out. But I'm more fascinated than frustrated, and I think that this is one of the most ambitious and remarkable books I've read this year. Adam Morris's crisp, clear translation actually manages makes the protagonist's constant theorising easier to follow--the challenge for the reader, I think, is in piecing it all together.

I would very much recommend Victoria Baena's (non-spoilery) review at the LA Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/r...

[Marie-Therese · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Really compelling, beautifully structured book that is dense with rich, chewy ideas and restrained but poignant emotion. I can't really do justice to it right now but suffice to say that this book should have won the 2018 National Book Award for Translation as it was light years better than anything that made the short list.

[Vartan · Rating 5 out of 5]

این رمان می‌تونه برای عاشقان لیسپکتور یک ابرشاهکار باشه. برنده جایزه کلاریس لیسپکتور هم شده. ترجمه هم که آقای رفویی مثل همه کارهاشون دقیق و پاکیزه و فنی عمل کرده بودند.
رمانی که به خوانش های مکرر پا میده

[Kevin James · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars, a dense and fractured tale about coming to terms with atrocity. Lyrically beautiful but a bit hard to unpack

[May · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally finished this book, you don't know how happy this makes me.

[Merricat Blackwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very small and very dense. I feel like I would have to read it a few more times to really grasp all of it. Gustavo, the narrator, is a teacher in Brazil approaching retirement. In 1970, 34 years before the events of the book, he was arrested by the Brazilian military junta and tortured. He insists that he didn’t give anything away, but he fell under suspicion when his brother-in-law was killed shortly after his capture. Gustavo has been approached by a young woman who wants to write a novel about the early days of the junta and hopes to learn something from his memories. Working in a school, she feels an “aggressive emptiness” between the teachers and wants to know what it was like when education had “explosive meaning, a detonating force.” The book is one long meditation, with no breaks between sections or moments in time, punctuated by brief excerpts from other texts: Gustavo’s documented observations of schools from his time as an academic, his brother’s semi-autobiographical novel of childhood, notebooks kept by his younger sister. Memories of torture layer closely with Gustavo’s reflections on schools. Together, the two sides of the story form a bracing reflection on control and sadism:

“Power, in my nightmares, resembles a great mass of energy, a black hole, turning and evolving through random movements corresponding to the strength of agitation made by all the groups it sucks into its vortex, deliriously smashing and pulverizing away like an abortion curette. I hear the uterine scream when the curete makes contact with living tissue, the crack of little skeletons when they break into pieces (Pedro Nava). My head pounding, I wake up sweaty, still resisting that sucking force carrying away my body. Like my father, I am not a good negotiator. I was never good with triangles, to say nothing of more complex polygons.”

Gustavo’s conception of power is not a conception of politics. He himself was not part of the resistance to the junta, not part of any formation. He was never trained in what to do under torture. Unlike those who were actually in revolutionary cells, he didn’t know what information he could afford to give up, and when. He simply took his beatings and tried not to talk. Power for him is in those random movements, that push and pull between individuals, sides of a polygon. He tells us about a boy in a school where he was the principal who was constantly accused of misbehavior and started to take the blame for other children’s actions, simply out of desire for an identity. He tells us about the shameful pleasure the guards took in beating him, and how he recognized that pleasure. The school, the family, are other theaters for that pleasure.

“What used to drive me away from my friends is now something I need. A totalizing vision throwing open the doors of the world, the whole world, its entire history, the primates, us, everywhere, yes, because this explanation is powerful and was something that could open access to every last corner, even to our souls and the hereafter. I understood that everything was coated in authoritarian ignorance, willingly, everyone was amputating their sensibility to reality, exempting ourselves from the efforts of the struggle. We mutilated our sensory capabilities and subjective intelligence when we enslaved ourselves to the notion of analysis.”

Gustavo ducks away from politics. He fears generalizations. He fears discipline, as in academic disciplines. He complains when he is selected to evaluate schools in his district; he wants to write long discursive letters about individual students, while his supervisor simply wants him to fill out forms. He was never part of a group. Even understanding the power dynamics within his own family, putting them into a story, as his brother does, feels to Gustavo like a kind of tyranny, a bright flashlight shining into his cell and about to come down on his head.

[Justin Goodman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Focused on the meditation of a psychological casualty of the military dictatorship of Brazil that was planted with US-support in a 1964 coup, I Didn't Talk is a complicated book. It continues Adam Morris' focus on confessionalism-adjacent narrations where the speaker represents a grim deadness of heart that feels like the only possible response to an atmospheric and pervasive sense of injustice in their society - e.g. With My Dog Eyes & Quiet Creature on the Corner. In this case, Gustavo is a retired principal going through his old papers and remembering his own torture and the ignominious death of his best friend/brother-in-law Antonio, along with the reverberations that had on his social circles who all thought he'd given Antonio up to save himself.

Whether he did or not is irrelevant since, like Jancar's The Tree with No Name, Nikitin's Y.T., and arguably Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, it's less about the concrete political reality and more about how one can live in the aftermath of the total and violent collapse of the dominant social order of their time. While closer to Jancar and Nikitin in its focus on an academic using their specialized field to philosophize, all four books are pervasive with the air of repressing everything in order to avoid the apocalypse (or failing to, and sinking into nothing).

Paul's review is honestly quite good. Overall I'd say it's not a bad book by any means, but not really remarkable. Maybe once I've finished reading Dictatorship And Armed Struggle In Brazil I'll have more context. Probably not any that will make this feel like a just fine blip.

[fivestarbookreview]

The trauma at the heart of Beatriz Bracher's I Didn't Talk is so horrifying that even the narrator has difficulty bringing it up. You'd be forgiven for thinking for the first half of the novel, that it was about the intricacies of school principal-dom. Gustavo, an educator to his core, did nothing to fall on the wrong side of Brazil's oppressive dictatorship, but when he and his brother-in-law are arrested and viciously tortured, only one of them survives. He assures himself that he didn't talk, but between the vagaries of memory and the black haze of his time in prison, no one can be completely sure. Bracher creates an erasure portrait of a man and a country scarred by what is too painful to remember.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The narrator may or may not be reliable and the reader won’t know because his is the story he told. He clearly suffers from the PTSD resulting from his torture, both physical and emotional. I don’t think he would suffer differently whether he had or had not told on Armando as he was being tortured. The stream of consciousness style and disordered timeline are fitting for this novel but made it a bit of a slog for me at this point in time. I did learn more about the military coup in 1960’s Brazil.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did, and perhaps a second read in a few years will set me right, but I found it far too unfocused. That's a shame, because otherwise it's everything I like: a bit of philosophy here, a bit of depressing history there, a boatload of moral conundrum and impossibility. But I think it needed to either be three times as long, or to lose a few of the many, many threads, which I, at least, found no way of tying together.

[Vanessa Machado · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eu ainda estou abalada com esse livro. Ele é muito muito forte. A Beatriz Bracher é uma das minhas autoras preferidas e escreveu "Não falei" com tanta honestidade que as páginas são capazes de cortar a pele. A história é envolvente e traz um olhar sobre um período histórico triste para o Brasil. Leitura obrigatória nos tempos atuais.

[Lynwrecker · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It’s been twenty-nine years and I still am ready to withstand.” Haunting tale about someone who’s breathed and lived underneath an oppressive government. Bracher’s choice to not include the torture Gustavo had undergone, but rather feelings of denial, regret, and that lasting fear following him in his later years was powerful. There’s always more weight in showing, than telling.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slim, but powerful. A stunning reflection on how politics seep into the personal, how every member of a given society, no matter his/her own opinions, is affected by those who resist, by those who actively support the regime, and also, by those who are indifferent.

[André Amorim · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5*

A leitura desse livro é difícil, mas a obra é excelente (e vale o esforço)! A linguagem e o jeito com o qual a autora construiu o texto me encantam. Um livro de muitas reflexões, e que traz um retrato duro sobre um momento tão difícil na história do nosso país.

[Laurel · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's no chapters! This book feels like a conversation.

[Rafaela Kino · Rating 1 out of 5]

unfocused

[Emma Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the longest short book I’ve ever read (and that is a compliment)

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I was reading this book, I would almost grasp it, and then I found the author went off on a different tack. Maybe, I'm not a fan of meandering books that dwell on unpleasantness and darkness.

[Paul Kerschen]

I thought the big reveal was going to be that he did talk, but the whole thing is much subtler than that: bravo.

[Mike]

I'm not rating this one. It was read at a busy time and rather piecemeal. I intend to try again later.