"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.
They don’t look like what we now think of as refugees—sitting at waterfront cafés over schnapps and shrimp, in suits, ties and summer frocks—but many of them have no place to go.
Volker Weidermann paints the desperate jollity in his slim, beautiful narrative of the time, Summer Before the Dark. Centering on the friendship of Zweig and Roth, this micro-history vividly captures the disbelief, the terror, the excitement and the denial within which many of Europe’s Jewish elites waited.
© Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais. All rights reserved.
