Posts featuring Adam Morris

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Antonio by Beatriz Bracher

April 14, 2021 | in Book Club | by Nicole Bilan

Bracher vaguely nods toward the uncanny, peeping out from behind confrontational realism.

Our Book Club selection for the month of March comes from one of Brazil’s most powerful contemporary voices. With Antonio, Beatriz Bracher brings philosophy and narrative in a deeply ruminative and immersive expedition through familial lineage, uncovering the various fragments of a tumultuous paternal relationship in order to understand the myriad forces that carries an individual from their origin to their present.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Antonio by Beatriz Bracher, translated from the Portuguese by Adam Morris, New Directions, 2021

“The spectators were part of the show, but they only realised it once they had gone by.”

To read Antonio is to become part of its story. In the conversational style that has become one of Beatriz Bracher’s calling cards, the narrative begins in a direct address to the reader, immediately situating us as characters for whom the story is told, as though one was crowded around a fireplace, listening to a relative tell stories from an armchair. Adopting the same hushed tones and subtle drama of the fireside orator in her writing, Bracher crafts a layered story which brims with mystery and tension. Effortlessly weaving her way through points of obscurity and shocking revelation, she plays with the reader-turned-listener as she leads us through the undulating landscape of a murky family history.

In Conversation with Adam Morris

September 12, 2016 | in Interviews | by Ryan Mihaly

I regard one of the functions of literature as social interaction, of reaching and challenging other minds. Otherwise, why write at all?

Adam Morris and I emailed over the course of July about his translation of João Gilberto Noll’s novel Quiet Creature on the Corner from Two Lines Press. The novel follows a young, freshly unemployed poet-drifter in Porto Alegre, Brazil who lands himself in jail after committing rape. Then, without explanation, he is taken to a country house owned by German immigrants Kurt and Gerda where the world suddenly turns irrational. As the protagonists’ world turns surreal, the real world churns on around him, as Lula runs for president for the first time, and the Landless Workers’ Movement stages protests on the street.

–Ryan Mihaly

Ryan Mihaly (RM): I want to start with a grammarian’s query as you say. Some of Noll’s sentences are relentlessly long and often change tense. They almost read like transcriptions of a casual conversation. Was there ever a temptation to break up Noll’s comma splices with something like a semicolon or em-dash instead of a comma?

Adam Morris (AM): You are really taking a risk with this question. I have worked as an editor for many years and am opinionated about grammar and punctuation. I’ll try to be brief.

Semicolons are not used in Brazilian Portuguese and are falling into disuse in English, except among the most pedantic writers. So I discarded that option out of hand. The narrator in Quiet Creature is not a pedant and is, as you say, speaking in a conversational tone. The em-dash was another available option, and unlike the semicolon, its prevalence is increasing. I often find it to be the signature of juvenile or lazy writing, which seemed suitable for the adolescent narrator of Quiet Creature. So I tried using it for some of the more blunt comma splices in Quiet Creature. But when I reread what I’d done, I discovered I’d lost the narrator’s voice. In English, the em-dash commands more of a pause than I heard in his wandering drift. His narration is not choppy or staccato, but a sort of numbed fugue of uneven pace. So the em-dash had to go. A few of them remained, and some turned into commas, but I got rid of most.