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Loading... Ashes of the Amazonby Milton Hatoum
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  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.
Ashes of the Amazon is the story of a long rebellion and the struggle to understand it. The rebel is Mundo, the embittered offshoot of a family split down the middle, whose artistic vocation clashes with his father's plans; the attempt to understand him falls to Lavo, a hard-working orphan who betters himself under the influence of Mundo's father, a rich businessman with friends in the military. However, the symbolic heart of the book lies not so much in Manaus and the final years of a boom produced by the merciless exploitation of the forest, but further down the great river, in Vila Amazonia, a palatial villa near Printins, the centre of a jute plantation and Mundo's worst nightmare. In his lifelong struggle to escape from his father's dynastic ambitions, Mundo distances himself as much as possible, taking the plot to Rio de Janeiro and the effervescent worlds of Berlin and London in the 1970s. In Ashes of the Amazon, Hatoum expands and deepens his fictional world, taking seriously Flaubert's injunction to write 'the moral history of his generation'. This beautiful, mature and bitter novel is the extraordinary result. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)869.342Literature Spanish and Portuguese Portuguese Portuguese fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.86)
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Wikipedia in English
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But Mundo has other father-figures: Arana, a self-styled great artist and opportunist who acts as his mentor; and Ranulfo, a proud wastrel whom Mundo befriended in his early childhood. It's Ranulfo who agrees to help Mundo execute his great piece of protest art, The Field of Crosses, a provocation that will bring the family conflict to a head.
Set in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Brazil was buckling under a military regime, Ashes of the Amazon is the story of Mundo's rebellion against the destiny his father has prepared for him; against massive authority, unshakable class structures, the all-pervasive influences of the military. It is not a fight Mundo can win. Indeed, the violent antipathy only has losers – father and son, friends, servants, and the boy's devoted mother Alícia, an ambitious woman trapped in a tormented marriage.
Like Hatoum's The Brothers, Ashes of the Amazon is at once a particular story and a generic one. The questions it raises relate to specific social ills in a certain country, but its power comes from great tensions that transcend these: of generational conflict, of bitter disappointments, of the role of the artist, of reactionary versus revolutionary.