Out of Amazonia

Manaus forms an exotic backdrop to a bitter tale. By Maya Jaggi

Milton Hatoum's early novels drew on his upbringing in the Brazilian melting-pot of Manaus, the rainforest river port legendary for its floating markets and extravagant opera house. Tale of a Certain Orient and The Brothers, explored the past of a city at the confluence of rivers and cultures that had lured workers and traders since the rubber boom of the 1880s - including Hatoum's Lebanese Arab forebears, who exchanged the Mediterranean for the Amazon. The Brothers, translated from the Portuguese in 2002, confirmed Hatoum as one of South America's leading contemporary novelists.

The entwined families of Ashes of the Amazon have no ties to the Levant, though their conflicts recall the archetypal rivalries of the earlier books. This novel alludes more directly to Hatoum's childhood years in its main setting of Manaus during Brazil's military dictatorship of 1964-85. Through a tale of two schoolfriends caught between vying adult mentors and tormentors, it evokes a bitterly fraught era of creativity and collusion, of rebellion, exile and defeat.

The main narrator is the orphan Lavo, brought up by his aunt Ramira, with desultory interventions from her brother Ranulfo, a one-time radio presenter sacked by the church-run station for obscenity, now dedicated to lying in a hammock. Lavo's friend Mundo is an aspiring artist whose tycoon father Jano inherited a steamship fortune from his Portuguese immigrant father. Mundo's beautiful mother Alícia, the daughter of an Amazonian Indian mother, is a compulsive drinker, gambler and shopper.

More convoluted bonds between the friends' families emerge, as Lavo learns that Ranulfo and Alícia were lovers, though Alícia chose to marry wealth, and Ranulfo to console himself by wedding Alícia's sister Algisa. This intricate web of jealousy and sibling rivalry is compounded by Jano's preference for sensible Lavo over his rebellious son Mundo, and Ranulfo's fondness for Alícia's child Mundo - who, it is hinted, may be Ranulfo's son.

The two boys meet in 1964, as school resumes after the military coup, in an atmosphere of brutality and bullying that echoes the rise of the army rulers. These include Colonel Zanda, busily deforming the landscape with a "crazed mania for modernisation" that delivers an urban slum named the New Eldorado. As Lavo opts to study law, Ranulfo objects: "All this law for nothing. The military have chucked all these laws in the bin."

Mundo's art, like Ranulfo's indolence, is a form of revolt, as his father sends him to military school to break him - and ensure that he is not "queer". Mundo finds inspiration in Amerindian art, and also - in an allusion to the Tropicalia movement, named after Hélio Oiticica's tropical-shack installation - in a Rio gallery with a "strange work of art: people went into a tent, put on a plastic cape full of folds and began gyrating and shouting, trying to free themselves of a lot of things".

Central to the novel is an invigoratingly astringent satire of the artist as fraud and sell-out. The studio of Alduíno Arana, a would-be mentor to Mundo, becomes the factory of a "vulgar salesman". From collages of beheaded fish smeared with red paint, he depicts macaws and sunsets. As Ranulfo scoffs: "He must have been overwhelmed by the grandeur of our natural surroundings." Whereas Mundo sketches faces in a Rio favela, Arana mimics Amerindians' art or incorporates their very bones in his installations, claiming they have washed up from collapsed tombs. Others suspect him of exhuming corpses. His "grotesque, hallucinatory vision" of the forest adorns the high-rise offices of construction companies, a cynicism prefigured by his taste for deflowering young girls, "fresh from upriver". Later exiled in Berlin and Brixton - at whose mini-markets he delights in mementos of Africa and the Amazon in okra and watermelons - Mundo realises that Arana had sought to inject him with the poisonous idea of "an 'authentic, pure Amazonian art', but . . . nothing is pure, authentic or original."

Both rebels are beaten. Ranulfo is scarred by "thugs or police", while Mundo's defiant installation - a row of burnt crosses at the ugly new town - is razed, and his father takes revenge. "It seemed as if a whole epoch had lain down and died." Yet as conflicts over the boys' future mirror contests for the soul of the country, for Mundo "there is always the revenge of the imagination, the revenge of the artist". When the military regime eventually falters, his paintings of decomposition and despair will outlive him.

Though extending into exile, the novel remains rooted in a tropical Manaus of floating bars, neoclassical mansions and shanties built out over the water. It is partly a sense of waste and destruction that gives this novel its bitterness. Yet the defeat of a generation, and its ultimate moral transcendence, also lends it an epic breadth.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/ashes-of-the-amazon-milton-hatoum