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Nowhere People
Winner of the Machado de Assis Prize
Driving home, law student Paulo passes a figure at the side of the road. The indigenous girl stands in the heavy rain, as if waiting for something. Paulo gives her a lift to her family’s roadside camp.
With sudden shifts in the characters’ lives, this novel takes in the whole story: telling of love, loss and family, it spans the worlds of São Paulo’s rich kids and dispossessed Guarani Indians along Brazil’s highways. One man escapes into an immigrant squatter’s life in London, while another’s performance activism leads to unexpected fame on Youtube.
Written from the gut, it is a raw and passionate classic in the making, about our need for a home.
Driving home, law student Paulo passes a figure at the side of the road. The indigenous girl stands in the heavy rain, as if waiting for something. Paulo gives her a lift to her family’s roadside camp.
With sudden shifts in the characters’ lives, this novel takes in the whole story: telling of love, loss and family, it spans the worlds of São Paulo’s rich kids and dispossessed Guarani Indians along Brazil’s highways. One man escapes into an immigrant squatter’s life in London, while another’s performance activism leads to unexpected fame on Youtube.
Written from the gut, it is a raw and passionate classic in the making, about our need for a home.
320 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2011
16 people are currently reading
533 people want to read
About the author
Paulo Scott
23 books66 followersNasceu em Porto Alegre, em 1966, e mora no Rio de Janeiro desde 2008. É autor dos romances Voláteis (Objetiva) e Habitante irreal (Alfaguara), livro ganhador do Prêmio Fundação Biblioteca Nacional 2012, concluído com o apoio da Bolsa Petrobras de Criação Literária 2010; do volume de contos Ainda orangotangos (Bertrand Brasil), adaptado para o cinema por Gustavo Spolidoro no longa-metragem de mesmo título que venceu o 13o Festival de Cinema de Milão, e do livro de poemas A timidez do monstro (Objetiva).
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
October 30, 2014
Perhaps it's my distance from the politics, the way this educated me about the social situation in Brazil. But this book broke my heart and rebuilt it in a way that is sadly rare for me with books these days. Flows from person to person showing members of Brazilian society encountering and changing one another, and how the structures they run up against can be the strongest forces of all. Hold on to the queasiness you feel with the Lolita-esque relationship in the first few chapters--your moral feelings will be proven right, but not without giving fair due to each perspective involved. It never preaches or moralizes, it dialecticizes. Similar to Coetzee's Disgrace, but told with impassioned language rather than cold remove.
November 24, 2014
Yet another brilliant unusual uncomfortable thrilling intelligent uncompromising novel bursts out of Latin America. If I was going to recommend one novel this year it would probably be this - And Other Stories deserve huge credit, as always, for daring to publish the books that boring mainstream houses won't touch. So good that I intend to read it again soon. Almost 5 stars.
June 18, 2016
longlisted for the 2016 international dublin literary award (along with 158 other books [is such an exhasutive longlist really necessary?!]), paulo scott's nowhere people (habitante irreal) is a powerful multi-generational story about national politics, family, indigenous rights, class, equality, social unrest, and legacy. set in both his native brazil and england, scott's stirring novel offers a stark and realistic portrait of hardship and struggle both personal and political. there's quite a lot to like in nowhere people (the often gorgeous writing not least of all) and hopefully it's but the first of scott's fiction (and poetry) to make its way into english.
*translated from the spanish by daniel hahn (saramago, tavares, peixoto, halfon, et al.)
if he'd had to summarise his days as a political militant, paulo would have said that he went from total idealism to unparalleled cynicism, then finally to the melancholy escapism of these last months.
*translated from the spanish by daniel hahn (saramago, tavares, peixoto, halfon, et al.)
July 19, 2020
Nowhere People
occurs in Brazil, mostly, and in Paris. Paulo, a man with the same name as the author, is both a character and the writer. As a young man in his early twenties, he is driving along an empty highway during bad weather and sees an adolescent Guarani girl walking. Perhaps drawn from real life but altered, this event starts a story that carries through many years and with many characters. The ending is magnificent, in my opinion, as surprising for Paulo as encountering Maína long ago.
July 31, 2017
Cross-posted from Nightjar's Jar of Books.
Driving home one evening from a Workers’ Party meeting, Brazilian law student Paulo meets a young girl on the side of the road, and decides to give her a lift. Maína is fourteen years old, Guarani Indian, and lives with her family in a roadside encampment; she’s not planning on going home.
If I could rate the two halves of this book separately, then I would. I didn’t exactly dislike the first half of the book, but I found it very difficult to get through… Scott’s words themselves (or at least Daniel Hahn’s translation of them) were really beautiful, but I found the way they were structured – each paragraph seeming to take up three or four pages, for no apparent reason – made it really tiring to read, and although (again), I didn’t precisely dislike the main character Paulo, I disapproved of nearly all his life decisions, and found it extremely uncomfortable being inside his head. The sections from Maína’s perspective I found easier to get through, but there weren’t very many of them, and they were all quite short.
However, about halfway through the book we’re introduced to a new main character, Donato, from whose perspective almost the entire remainder of the book is shown, and I loved this part (despite the continuing problem with the paragraph structure). His outlook on the world, his circumstances, his relationships with his friends and parents… they were all really interesting, and only seemed to be becoming more so as the book went on. In particular, I really loved his performance activism towards the end, and the contrast it provided with Paulo’s much less fruitful efforts at activism at the beginning of the book… I only regret that the story ended where it did, as the final scene (a return to Paulo’s perspective) marked a dramatic change for both Paulo and Donato, which I feel could have been explored further.
May 5, 2017
The book opens with Paulo, a Brazilian law student and activist, driving along a highway in torrential rain and spotting a poor indigenous girl at the side of the road. Stopping to give 14-year-old Maína a lift sets in motion events that reverberate through two decades of relationships, politics and activism.
Paulo is like many idealistic young socialists – rich, oblivious to the reality of poverty and the true effect of his actions, but genuinely well intentioned. Maína is a Guarani Indian and lives with her family in a tent at the side of the road. She collects discarded newspapers and magazines from which to learn Portuguese. She is quiet but not shy, and she and Paulo learn to communicate in words, though not in understanding.
The prose is dense – most paragraphs go on for two or three pages – but it’s so well written that I found it thoroughly absorbing, full of amazing life-filled characters who I really felt I had come to know. However, it does suffer from that family saga trait of skipping forwards in time, jumping to a new setting or character every 50 or so pages, which would leave me feeling a little lost. It wasn’t always clear exactly how much time had passed, at least at first, but cultural and political references give clues.
Read my full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2017/05/...
Paulo is like many idealistic young socialists – rich, oblivious to the reality of poverty and the true effect of his actions, but genuinely well intentioned. Maína is a Guarani Indian and lives with her family in a tent at the side of the road. She collects discarded newspapers and magazines from which to learn Portuguese. She is quiet but not shy, and she and Paulo learn to communicate in words, though not in understanding.
The prose is dense – most paragraphs go on for two or three pages – but it’s so well written that I found it thoroughly absorbing, full of amazing life-filled characters who I really felt I had come to know. However, it does suffer from that family saga trait of skipping forwards in time, jumping to a new setting or character every 50 or so pages, which would leave me feeling a little lost. It wasn’t always clear exactly how much time had passed, at least at first, but cultural and political references give clues.
Read my full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2017/05/...
July 11, 2018
What a mess. It could be a story about shallow self-centered political activism (Paulo). Or it could be a moving chronicle of the plight of indigenous Brazilians (Maina). But no, we drop those characters and move on to school kids Donato, the mixed-race misfit son of Maina, and Rener, a socially popular girl. That's been done-to-death in teen literature, and much better than here. Our misfit sleeps with his step-mother, which could also be an interesting story line, but isn't developed. After a few more plot dead ends and characters that seem to have no purpose, we end with Donato as an street/internet performance artist with some vague statement about the plight of indigenous peoples. Well, we'd better finish this mess, so re-introduce Paulo and wrap things up in 10 pages or so.
I suppose this could all be an allegory of some sort, but that's neither clear nor very moving.
I suppose this could all be an allegory of some sort, but that's neither clear nor very moving.
October 14, 2023
What a clusterfuck of a book. Not only problematic and male gazey in so many ways but also incoherent as fuck. The most disturbing thing was the romantic and sexual relationship between a 14 year old girl and a 21 year old man who seems suspiciously to be a self-insert for the author and even has the same name and profession as him. And the way there never was any sort of deeper reflection on his fucked up behavior beyond "he was depressed and fucking around". All I can say is that the book is nothing like the blurb and I mean it in the most negative way possible.
August 10, 2018
Muito bom! a sensação que tenho agora em que acabei o livro é de que o autor foi efetivo, não sei pq, mas é isso. O livro começa bem irrelevante como a maioria dos livros contemporâneos da nossa literatura, mas na segunda parte se expande de forma completamente imprevisível. A questão da busca (ou ausência no caso) por uma identidade também é interessante, principalmente sobre a ótica da pauta "indígena",enfim muito bom.
September 3, 2018
I started out this book thinking I didn't like it but then I read it all in one sitting so clearly it worked some kind of magic after all. It's a weird book, and I mean that as a compliment. It's uncomfortable and it's supposed to be; the characters can be awful, the world they live in certainly is. I liked that it swept across generations, my favorite books always do. I'm being vague because I think the way I read it is best—just sit down with no expectations and get sucked in.
November 20, 2017
3.5 stars
January 6, 2023
Fala de uma realidade que conheço mal. Se essa familiaridade existisse talvez tivesse sentido o livro como merece. Mas a escrita é magnífica e não ponho de parte a hipótese de voltar a este autor.
March 26, 2012
Segundo livro do gaúcho Paulo Scott, Habitante Irreal foi um, sem dúvida, um dos grandes livros publicados em 2011 e uma excelente escolha para 2012.
O romance inicia com a história de Paulo, um estudante de Direito frustrado que, ao voltar de um congresso político no interior do Estado, dá carona a uma índia que vira na margem da BR. Paulo e a índia (Maína) têm um caso e Maína acaba engravidando. Sem saber da gravidez, Paulo viaja para Londres, com o objetivo de se esconder de seus problemas, vivendo como imigrante ilegal.
O desencanto de Paulo com a política, notadamente com os rumos que a esquerda (nomeadamente o PT, que vencera as eleições para prefeito de Porto Alegre em 1989) vinha adotando, são um espelho bastante realista da geração que viveu o sonho da redemocratização e viu a ilusão esquerdista (e petista) ser destruída pelas práticas corruptas e antidemocráticas do partido. Mais do que isso, é a geração frustrada que não conseguiu ver seus sonhos realizados. O autor, entretanto, não se contenta em tratar “apenas” de temas brasileiros contemporâneos, deixando isso claro ao retratar a insatisfação de Paulo com as perspectivas da carreira de advogado, sua fuga desesperada e patética para Londres.
Caso o romance se limitasse a seguir essa linha narrativa, já seria um bom livro. Mas Scott não está disposto a apenas escrever um bom livro. Com bastante coragem, dá uma guinada na narrativa, passando a acompanhar as conseqüências dos atos de Paulo, que fica “esquecido” até quase o fim do romance. Maína tem o filho (chamado Donato), que, por força de circunstâncias (e não vou estragar a leitura), acaba sendo adotado por um casal de professores. Por diversos motivos, Donato cresce como um outsider, isolado em seu mundo.
E nesse ponto O Habitante Irreal mostra porque é um excelente livro. Quase como um passe de mágica, o livro passa a tratar de temas realmente universais. O habitante irreal do título é, mais do que tudo, uma metáfora muito bem construída para refletir os temas que são discutidos no livro. Donato, assim como o pai, é um eterno estranho em seu ambiente, sempre incomodado com algo que nem sabe exatamente o que. Se Paulo se esconde em Londres, Donato se esconde em sua gagueira, em sua distância do mundo. A máscara que passa a usar em determinado ponto do romance é uma forma quase infantil de conseguir interagir com o mundo.
Quando digo que o autor não se "limita" a tratar de temas brasileiros, faço isso como um elogio. Acho que o grande pecado da literatura brasileira (e latino-americana) é a sua insistência em ser mediocremente local, evitando a todo custo qualquer possibilidade de tratar de temas universais. Por mais que os europeus achem extremamente charmoso, para mim aquele dendê mal preparado de autores como Jorge Amado nada tem de literariamente interessante.
Por fim, não se pode negar que Scott é um excelente contador de histórias. Daqueles que prendem o leitor até a última página. Seu livro não é um chato tratado sobre a condição humana. Muito pelo contrário, é uma história muito bem contada.
Concordo com a resenha do Sérgio Rodrigues (do Todoprosa).Desabou entre nós um grande livro!
Recomendo fortemente a leitura.
Resenha originalmente publicada em http://blogdorcf.blogspot.com.br/2012...
O romance inicia com a história de Paulo, um estudante de Direito frustrado que, ao voltar de um congresso político no interior do Estado, dá carona a uma índia que vira na margem da BR. Paulo e a índia (Maína) têm um caso e Maína acaba engravidando. Sem saber da gravidez, Paulo viaja para Londres, com o objetivo de se esconder de seus problemas, vivendo como imigrante ilegal.
O desencanto de Paulo com a política, notadamente com os rumos que a esquerda (nomeadamente o PT, que vencera as eleições para prefeito de Porto Alegre em 1989) vinha adotando, são um espelho bastante realista da geração que viveu o sonho da redemocratização e viu a ilusão esquerdista (e petista) ser destruída pelas práticas corruptas e antidemocráticas do partido. Mais do que isso, é a geração frustrada que não conseguiu ver seus sonhos realizados. O autor, entretanto, não se contenta em tratar “apenas” de temas brasileiros contemporâneos, deixando isso claro ao retratar a insatisfação de Paulo com as perspectivas da carreira de advogado, sua fuga desesperada e patética para Londres.
Caso o romance se limitasse a seguir essa linha narrativa, já seria um bom livro. Mas Scott não está disposto a apenas escrever um bom livro. Com bastante coragem, dá uma guinada na narrativa, passando a acompanhar as conseqüências dos atos de Paulo, que fica “esquecido” até quase o fim do romance. Maína tem o filho (chamado Donato), que, por força de circunstâncias (e não vou estragar a leitura), acaba sendo adotado por um casal de professores. Por diversos motivos, Donato cresce como um outsider, isolado em seu mundo.
E nesse ponto O Habitante Irreal mostra porque é um excelente livro. Quase como um passe de mágica, o livro passa a tratar de temas realmente universais. O habitante irreal do título é, mais do que tudo, uma metáfora muito bem construída para refletir os temas que são discutidos no livro. Donato, assim como o pai, é um eterno estranho em seu ambiente, sempre incomodado com algo que nem sabe exatamente o que. Se Paulo se esconde em Londres, Donato se esconde em sua gagueira, em sua distância do mundo. A máscara que passa a usar em determinado ponto do romance é uma forma quase infantil de conseguir interagir com o mundo.
Quando digo que o autor não se "limita" a tratar de temas brasileiros, faço isso como um elogio. Acho que o grande pecado da literatura brasileira (e latino-americana) é a sua insistência em ser mediocremente local, evitando a todo custo qualquer possibilidade de tratar de temas universais. Por mais que os europeus achem extremamente charmoso, para mim aquele dendê mal preparado de autores como Jorge Amado nada tem de literariamente interessante.
Por fim, não se pode negar que Scott é um excelente contador de histórias. Daqueles que prendem o leitor até a última página. Seu livro não é um chato tratado sobre a condição humana. Muito pelo contrário, é uma história muito bem contada.
Concordo com a resenha do Sérgio Rodrigues (do Todoprosa).Desabou entre nós um grande livro!
Recomendo fortemente a leitura.
Resenha originalmente publicada em http://blogdorcf.blogspot.com.br/2012...
November 7, 2025
The reader needs to be eased into Scott’s writing. The words are crammed into breathless paragraphs that seem to have no end. His writing assaults, slams, sends the reader rolling, and finally spits them out. It’s a demanding reading experience, one that requires going back, retracing, rereading, stopping in your tracks, walking away, and then walking back. It’s linguistically challenging: just the kind of experience I seek when reading.
Language aside, the content of this book is thought-provoking. As the author himself said, it’s probably the first book in Brazilian literature where voice and agency are given to an indigenous girl, a fourteen-year-old Guaraní girl living in an encampment right next to a busy highway in the Rio Grande do Sul region. Hers is the experience of being uprooted, displaced, and taken advantage of on multiple levels. Maína’s story exemplifies that of indigenous people: their precariousness, exploitation, and the blatant abuse of their rights.
This book doesn’t just tell a story, it demands your attention. It makes you want to talk, to put issues on the table, to face them, before it’s too late.
Language aside, the content of this book is thought-provoking. As the author himself said, it’s probably the first book in Brazilian literature where voice and agency are given to an indigenous girl, a fourteen-year-old Guaraní girl living in an encampment right next to a busy highway in the Rio Grande do Sul region. Hers is the experience of being uprooted, displaced, and taken advantage of on multiple levels. Maína’s story exemplifies that of indigenous people: their precariousness, exploitation, and the blatant abuse of their rights.
This book doesn’t just tell a story, it demands your attention. It makes you want to talk, to put issues on the table, to face them, before it’s too late.
July 25, 2017
Beautiful yet tragic story. The book wasn't what I expected. It doesn't jump from one character's point of view to another's like I thought. It's told by a narrator who generally gives too much extra information and also doesn't allow the reader to truly connect to the characters in a way that could have better benefited the truly amazing story it is. It also gives a lot of insight into how the indigenous people were perceived and interacted with the modern day Brazilians.
January 10, 2015
Thanks to Alexander Book Co for introducing me to this fascinating Brazilian novel.
Driving home from a political rally in the heavy rain, Paulo stops for a hitchhiker on the side of a mountain road. For better or for worse (mainly for worse), he offers Maína, a young indigenous girl, a ride away from her home and into the city.
Driving home from a political rally in the heavy rain, Paulo stops for a hitchhiker on the side of a mountain road. For better or for worse (mainly for worse), he offers Maína, a young indigenous girl, a ride away from her home and into the city.
January 12, 2015
Uncomfortable reading in many parts but no the less gripping and intriguing. Almost a series of short stories about the lives of one interconnected 'family'. Quite unlike anything I've read before. Recommended.
September 22, 2014
Really spectacular book. Definitely going to use this in my class, and am looking forward to rereading it now that I have a picture of how it all fits together.
January 1, 2015
Excellent book. An interesting story that brings together various elements of society in Brazil.. Looking forward to his next novel
May 14, 2015
Maybe something was lost in the translation for me, but I never felt connected or very intrigued, and was often confused by this book.
May 17, 2016
I didn't enjoy it.
December 19, 2014
irretocável até a pg. 200
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews