Teeth under the Sun

by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão

A modern-day Don Quixote and an exile in his own hometown, the protagonist of Teeth Under the Sun is kept from writing by a conspiracy (real? imagined?) designed to prevent him from revealing the truth about the town's strange status quo and violent past.In a place where people have abandoned their houses for tiny apartments in the confines of new high-rises, the narrator walks the almost empty streets, remembering better times and meeting figures from his past: his ex-wife, his son, writers, friends, and revolutionaries. And all of this is interspersed with his memories of the movies Fact and fiction, past and present, all meet in this story of the narrator's attempts to engage more fully with a modern world forcing him into isolation.

Genres: Novels, Portuguese Literature, Fiction, Brazil

368 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2007

About the author

Ignacio de Loyola Brandao (born 1936 in Araraquara in São Paulo) began his career writing film reviews and went on to work for one of the principal newspapers in São Paulo. Initially banned in Brazil, his novel Zero went on to win the prestigious Brasilia Prize and become a controversial bestseller. Brandão is the author of more than a half-dozen works of fiction, including Zero, Teeth Under the Sun, and Angel of Death, all of which are available or forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. In his career he has won the Prêmio Jabuti, the most important literary prize in Brazil.

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book -- it took the first hundred pages to adapt to the structure, but once I did my teeth crumbled biting down. I appreciate Anonymous Celebrity even more after reading this earlier work. One of the characters, Danilo, gives away Kis' influence, the river of nouns and details as in Encyclopedia of the Dead, a style which Brandao assimilates in an entirely original voice. And the nightmare sections. Lydia Davis must have read this book! (For example I'm thinking of Brandao's section "The Wire Vegetable Garden" or "The Swallowing Swimming Pool" and Davis' "The White Tribe" from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant.) It pains me to give this novel four stars, but as a complete work it's not on the same level as Anonymous Celebrity. Granted, it was published 26 years earlier. Still, a great read. - Ryan O'Connor

[zunggg · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the town of Araraquara standing in for Brazil as a whole, this novel mines the same vein of national malaise, censorship, ecocide and societal control as the other two I’ve read by Brandão — And Still the Earth (original title Não verás país nenhum) and Zero. With the former it shares the counterpoint narrative of the author’s disintegrated marriage, and with both, the observational humour and wild gyrations of style. But it’s not as fluent as those, being the patchworked memoirs and hallucinations of a bona-fide madman, and it’s often hard to know or care what the hell is going on. Still, some of the elegiac domestic moments are touching and the climactic crackup is as good as any I’ve read.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I think I understand the purpose of Teeth Under the Sun being written in the manner that it was, this didn't make my attempt at reading it any easier or more enjoyable. The text often read like an incoherent stream of consciousness, and felt like a descent into madness as a result of the protagonist's own confinement.

I get that the narrative is meant to be something of a prolonged allegory on dictatorships, censorship, and being silenced (literally and figuratively). Even with all that in mind, though, it often felt like I was doing mental gymnastics just to keep up and attempt to decipher what the protagonist was actually experiencing versus what he was imagining. It all got to be too much, especially 200+ pages of this. To me, a short story version would've been much more impactful and digestible. I ended up unable to make it past the first 100 pages.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unreliable narrator living in a plentiful array of unreliable realities (a Don Quixote that never leaves the city proper) spills his story like a new puzzle on the floor, each tiny chapter seemingly unrelated until you find that chapter 5 goes with 1 to build the castle, 10 with 3 to form the moat and so on. By midway, you have enough of a picture to call the aloof protagonist out on his tall (disjointed) tale or get lost in the view. A bell curve with Gateway Arch proportions depicts the painful sting of reality that follows the comedic buzz of fantasy, singing “a spoonful of medicine helps the blood sugar go down.”

[Flávia Carvalho · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very special book to me, cause it communicates with some deep feelings...
This author was born in my hometown, in Brazil, and the book is about a guy who leaves the city, and years later come back to find it....just the same: the people, the places...Beautifully written!