"I read the way one might stroll. … I feel myself to be a sacred trespasser…"
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
When the Viennese author Stefan Zweig first travelled to Brazil in 1936, he deemed the South American country “terra incognita in the cultural sense.”
Now that we've lived with Brazil through the Olympics coverage and caught glimpses of the place and its people, we look to a variety of novels to pull us further into this diverse land.
Readers assumed it was a pseudonym. The author, some said, had to be a man. Surely it couldn’t be as simple—as complex—as it seemed: in 1943, the twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian-born Clarice Lispector, daughter of Russian-Jewish émigrés living in exile in Brazil, published a debut novel that generated the kind of literary celebrity that no longer exists. Critics and readers established a new name for this literary wonder: the author became known as nothing less than “Hurricane Clarice.”
The Nobel Prize for Literature has never been awarded to a photographer, but over the past forty years the Brazilian-born Sebastião Salgado has traveled the globe to tell some of the world’s most pressing stories. From drought in the Sudan to genocide in Rwanda, forced migrations across borders, refugee camps in Africa, the burning oil fields in Kuwait to the glorious pristine corners and species of our planet, Salgado has given us iconic images of the past half-century.
© Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais. All rights reserved.
