Rubem Fonseca: Scratch and Win
Google, which does not always find everything, almost limits Rubem Fonseca to crime novels. The Brazilian writer resorts to the genre’s clichés in order to subvert them: once we have scratched off a first layer of pulp entertainment, we are met with a genuinely inconvenient truth. In his work, which includes short stories, novels and screenplays, Fonseca uses his detectives and bullets as elements with which to build a sociological portrait: although we can recognise the time period and the location (Brazil, second half of the 20th century), a change in the stories’ coordinates would not detract from the verisimilitude of these aimless, rudderless characters.
RBA is now reprinting The Debt Collector, published in 1979 and translated into Spanish one year later. This book has two facets: one which will satisfy lovers of the genre (with an abundance of crimes, vested interests and femmes fatales, in stories such as Meeting on the Amazon and Mandrake, which stars his favourite character), and another, fragmented, facet which speaks of class differences, historical mistakes, etc. In the book’s final story, which also lends it its title, a psychopath decides to stop paying, and to attack, Magnum revolver in hand, anyone who gets in his way. He does not fight against general injustice, nor does he aspire to change society, but rather, as a product of this society, he survives thanks to our own degradation. The debt collector, therefore, is right to hold out his hand and his gun: we owe him something.
A friend betrays another for money in The Dead Man’s Game, the best of the stories, thanks both to its mounting tension and to the harmony achieved between the two sides of Fonseca, despite its unexpected moral lesson, which nevertheless reinforces an almost metaphoric decision on the part of the protagonist: if a bet is enough to make you order a killing, dying won’t bother you much. “All art is symbolic. However, would it not be preferable, more symbolic, to write about people who kill one another?” wonders the paedophile writer in Pierrot of the Cavern. And there is more: 1984, which takes place in an old people’s home, and the austere micro-narratives which are based on police reports. Rubem Fonseca deserves a lack of bias, the ability to be surprised: not in vain did Thomas Pynchon claim that “the best thing about his work is not knowing where he will take us. Whenever I begin one of his books it is as if the phone rings in the middle of the night: ‘Hi, it’s me. You are not going to believe what’s happening.’”
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