After Life: An Ethnographic Novel

by Tobias Hecht

Bruna Veríssimo, a youth from the hardscrabble streets of Recife, in Northeast Brazil, spoke with Tobias Hecht over the course of many years, reliving her early childhood in a raging and destitute home, her initiation into the world of prostitution at a time when her contemporaries had scarcely started school, and her coming of age against all odds. Hecht had originally intended to write a biography of Veríssimo. But with interviews ultimately spanning a decade, he couldn't ignore that much of what he had been told wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. In Veríssimo’s recounting of her life, a sister who had never been born died tragically, while the very same rape that shattered the body and mind of an acquaintance occurred a second time, only with a different victim and several years later. At night, with the anthropologist’s tape recorder in hand, she became her own ethnographer, inventing informants, interviewing herself, and answering in distinct voices. With truth impossible to disentangle from invention, Hecht followed the lead of Veríssimo, his would-be informant, creating characters, rendering a tale that didn’t happen but that might have, probing at what it means to translate a life into words. A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.

Genres: Anthropology, Literature, Nonfiction, Ethnography

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A creative and insightful example of the turmoils experienced by the ethnographic researcher, questions of ethics and judgement, and the brilliance and complexity of those people who anthropologists theorize about.

[Michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots to say about the process of doing anthropology and the motives (madness, loneliness, etc) for doing it. Still it felt like a book written to justify grant money on a project that didn't go where it was supposed to.

[Sylvia]

what the hell is an etnographic novel? I asked myself when i got this book. Not that at the end I could realize what it was but i can definitely say that the real novel here is not the one Tobias write but the one his character does. A sociological research becomes an excuse for narrative. Life in Brazil becomes life everywhere.

[Val · Rating 4 out of 5]

got assigned this book for my ethnography class and this book does indeed touch upon a lot of ethical and practical concerns that i have encountered so far in working on my field work. my impression of this book is somewhat a struggle of the author (tobias) to reconcile with the inevitably complex nature of working on the field and interacting with the interlocutors. the desire to probe into people’s life, or to a larger extent to change, to bring betterment to the people that we are working with - specifically here the marginalized, might be just as well a fantasy, a-savior-complex kind of ideal we try to impose on our works.

yet with that being said the work might not bring the best resolution to the issue of ethics, but it is worth examining and bringing up onto the discourse of ethnography, as well as other fields in academia.

[maryanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

idk abt the politics around the publication of this book, but I still thought there was a lot of interesting questions and insight from it and im glad I read it

made me realize world so big, w so many different people and consequently, different perspectives;

in this way, i realize that whatever decisions ppl make for themselves come from their own perspective, and that our determination of whether that’s right or wrong is not any more of a grander truth than their determination, but the product of our own perspective as well

[Sovy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely co-opting and selfish of Hecht to commodify Bruna’s trauma