From the cover of the book.
Infinite youth is a 2017 novel by Brazilian journalist Urariano Mota, active in the underground Communist Party of Brazil during the harshest period of the country’s military dictatorship from the late 1960s to early 1970s. The novel is set in Recife, the state capital Pernambuco and a large city of northeastern Brazil, a patriarchal cultural area that corresponds to the US South as a former plantation area, but also as a font of archetypal folk cultural roots.
The novel evokes the struggles of seriously committed idealistic youth in a decade associated with cultural and somewhat global political transformation and reinvention. The conceptual focus triangulates between 1) the disasters of the war as written by the Party, 2) the vivid unfolding of a popular and bohemian cultural panorama, especially through the lens of the Tropicalism movement—itself informed by the North Atlantic youth revolution of the time—and 3 ) nature of the recollection of youthful idealism and heroism by now elderly but still very active persons, for whom those golden years remain more vital and real than today’s consumer-saturated age of democracy.
Presented as a memoir and narrated by a character who seems to closely match Mota, it is peppered with literary allusions to the European and Brazilian canons (Turgenev, Goethe, Cervantes; Manuel Bandeira, Drummond de Andrade, Jorge Amado) the Marxist litany of time (Leninism, Maoism, Che-adulation), and American and Brazilian popular culture (Ella Fitzgerald, Marlon Brando, Nelson Cavaquinho). The protagonist/narrator’s anti-heroic self-awareness creates an ironic hall of mirrors, positioned somewhere between Magical Realism and Gonzo journalism.
In accordance with materialist thinking, the very circumstance of our reading cannot be understood without reference to the cooperative triangle between sympathetic parties. This includes the American translator, Peter Lownds, a Latin American freelance scholar and creative writer, and the editor (Eric A. Gordon, an editor at People’s World and as Lownds a freelance researcher and translator of Portuguese). Both had formative experiences as young adults in Brazil in the late 1960s. Excellent forewords to this text, a novel-memoir, appear in the book, in Lownds’ foreword and Gordon’s introductory note, which are complemented by interviews of “People’s World of Lownds” by Gordon last June. Lownds was a Peace Corps volunteer in Recife, Gordon a graduate student doing field research in Rio.
Finally, International Publishers should be commended for the initiative. The book is carefully copied and, professionally, well produced. The translation is extremely well done. The text is full of local and national references, many of them unknown even to Brazilians, which are briefly explained through notes. The cadence of the prose, which often presents a stream of highly subjective, psychologically vivid changes, is fascinatingly captured, and its flow, which is both conceptually and syntactically challenging, is conveyed with remarkably little friction. This is indeed a difficult text to translate on many fronts, but Lownds is fully capable of this labor of love.
Recife as protagonist
Now let’s stop at the content, historical and literary. Recife is as much the protagonist as the individual of the narrative voice. Despite the inevitable inaccuracies of such a generalization, comparing the Brazilian Northeast with the US South is useful for non-Brazilians. Within the Northeast, a useful later comparative gloss will contrast Recife with the other major northeastern city, Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia and font of Afro-Brazilian culture, which, stereotypically, dominates the exteriors of Folkloric Brazil. Recife has a vein of folkloric motifs that are richer, more varied, more subtle and generally less exported. For each city, the culminating cultural event is the annual carnival, and the two are completely different (while Rio’s more famous carnival is another approach again).
Both the seminal Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freire (1900-1987) and the educational reformer Paulo Freire (1921-1997) were from Recife, which – Salvador being an exceptional case – can be understood as the organic capital of the entire Northeast. Recife is a patriarchal city, but it has a considerable degree of industrialization and a small liberal middle class in tune with the progressive currents from São Paulo. The Archbishop of Recife, Hélder Câmara, was a central figure of the years of Liberation Theology in the 1960s and 1970s. The vitality of the city’s folk culture is also susceptible to dynamism, as reflected in its rap culture in recent decades and eclectic cosmovision of his grunge guru, Chico Science.
As we read this text, however, very little is evoked of this cultural origin. The author insists on a deliberately myopic view of the first-person protagonist. Yes, he is a communist activist in mortal danger and is assigned various specific tasks such as printing and distributing pamphlets. But the bulk of the text describes a handful of prominent personalities, including a beautiful and idealistic young communist woman, domestic scenes (eg, his being annoying to share a small room, woe with a friend) and above all small social scenes – the gathering of friends in bars, who drink wonderfully and wax lyrical, philosophizing about the work of various musical artists.
Recovering lost time
As the title and numerous literary allusions suggest, the real agenda in the work is the search for a postmodern response to the Pustian motif of memory and the recovery of lost time: “Postmodern” not on the basis of any radical theoretical proposition, but rather on the recognition of the excessive clutter of modern consumer life, the apparent irrelevance of the courageous Marxist practice of yesteryear, and the protagonist’s weakening from the aging process. In other words, the respective frustrations of consumption, of the party (at least the party as it then existed) and of oneself.
This leads to a repetition of questions instead of answers. What did all that youthful conviction and adventure mean? Is the nature of youth – its unique character as revealed in circumstances of oppression, risk, marginalization – driven as much by the voluntary choices of the protagonists as by the external “system”? Are people driven by passion a more intense expression of youth and therefore more precious? In the particular case of political idealists, what can we learn about the nature of their memory as they age—does the person push the materialist or vice versa? If it was a dream, was it noble and priceless, or an ill-conceived gamble? If ideology is a dead end, what is left to redeem? In the face of failures and disappointments, is it true that through their paths of courage, these protagonists gain spiritual vitality and social assets (friendship, solidarity, habits of altruism, discipline, etc.) which remain intact, so that the gains exceed many losses, in order to achieve a “meaningful life” on a personal and interpersonal level? Finally, for the communist who thinks that all disappointments are simply battles lost in a war yet to be won, according to a script that remains true to its core, what strategic lessons are there to be learned?
Please excuse so many questions. Uraniano Mota is well aware of them, but, unlike Proust – or unlike orthodox Marxist literary critics like Georg Lukács – he is unwilling to answer. The narrator presents a compulsive engagement with futility. One wonders if the real literary motive behind the author is not, on the contrary, the greatest, but one of all creeps, the eponymous first-person narrator of Surpriseds Watts, the work of 19th-century ironist Machado de Assis, generally considered the greatest Brazilian writer. One literary predecessor, however, is unmistakable: it is the smitten, lovelorn journalist and man of letters Fausto Pena, the protagonist of Jorge Amado’s 1969 post-modern story. tent of wonders (“Workshop of Miracles”). In his prime, Amado, the most popular Brazilian author before Paulo Coelho, and a committed Marxist, wrote many excellent adventure stories with an orthodox Marxist theoretical framework behind them. Like Fausto Pena, Urariano Mota is a journalist. And Mota’s alter-ego narrator is, like Fausto, a would-be romantic, a disillusioned idealist, an alcoholic, a machista guilty of middle-class cowardice and hypocrisy.
The difference is that while this contemporary story in Amado’s novel serves as a space for the expression of a political cynicism acquired with age, it is counteracted by a positive and larger story set in an earlier era. Amado’s structure is thus a triptych: organic, pre-modern culture, Marxist orthodoxy and a late modern irony. In Mota’s novel-memoir, however, we are trapped within the walls of a single perspective and narrative game, the effect of which is ultimately claustrophobic. Mota repeatedly poses a series of deep and universal questions, but he tries to resolve them either by conscious assertion or by subconscious workings of plot and character. His text has the same narrative energy, height, and perspective at the end as at the beginning, as if the pleasure of his circular words were inherently self-serving. Lovers of socialist realism and mainstream Western consumer readers may not be convinced.
The issue of genre
If we are to evaluate this work, the issue of genre is central. While it is repeatedly referred to as a novel, it reads like a memoir, with many real names of Recife places and institutions, and a banality in the order of events described that rings true with the flavor of the day. His basic questions are those asked by a certain generation (young radical idealists). This is marked by titles (functioning as chapter divisions), which tend to be statements about the collective condition (eg, “Dreamers Aren’t Poor,” “Loving is Wrong in a Dictatorship,” “Where Are We Going?” ? “).
In other words, its literary value is to a large extent built upon that of its socio-historical environment, against which the subjective sensibility of the self-aware narrator intervenes freely and loudly. The time frame oscillates between past and present moments, and the use of verb tenses switches between present tense for the present moment (that of the story), historical present for dramatic effect, and past tense for past moments. All of this is the narrative equivalent of the conscious cameras of New Wave cinema.
So we have a mix of often alcohol-induced regrets, self-aware intellectual artistry, documentary allusions to urban reality, and vanguard political statements. Not to diminish the origin of the author as a communist, journalist and successful novelist, the main value of this text is more in its potential than in its execution. Some readers might wish Mota had channeled his muse into either a more literary novel or a more essayistic memoir. They will have to decide for themselves whether prose poetry as a genre lends itself to novel length. Many other readers, I’m sure, will find themselves enjoying it.
Infinite youth
Band Urariano Mota
Tranchesedited from the Portuguese by Peter Lownds
New York: International Publishers, 2022
ISBN 978-0717800063
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