Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil: Memories, Politics andIdentities, ed. by Sara Brandellero and Lúcia Villares (Cardiff: Universityof Wales Press, 2017).

Abstract

Reviews 106 intellectual history. Besides the catalogues of major libraries, such as the Alcobaça collection or Lisbon’s Convent of Nossa Senhora de Jesus, which is today conserved in the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, this book documents inventories of many more modest libraries, as well as individuals’ personal collections in conjunction with diverse legal documents and correspondence that offer valuable perspectives on the histories of book collecting and reading in ecclesiastical libraries. Toorientatethereader’sexplorationofthismonumentalcatalogueGiurgevich and Leitão provide a succinct introduction, which addresses the range and dimensions of ecclesiastical libraries over the course of their history up until 1834. They then focus on key facets of these libraries elucidated by the documents they catalogue, such as the control exerted over reading and the circulation of books. In addition to this a digital dimension to this book should also be highlighted. The book reviewed here is an independent and valuable resource in its own right, but the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal also hosts a complementary website that provides access to digital editions of some of the documents catalogued: http://clavisbibliothecarum.bn.pt/index.php. While this site is still a work in progress, it provides readers with a valuable opportunity to begin exploring some of the many libraries to which Clavis Bibliothecarum offers a key. Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil: Memories, Politics and Identities, ed. by Sara Brandellero and Lúcia Villares (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017). 251 pages. Print and e-book. Reviewed by Paul Melo e Castro (University of Glasgow) In the Anglophone world, Ramos’s best-known novel Vidas secas has been read by several generations of students in the fields of Portuguese Studies and Comparative Literature and continues to be a staple of readings lists today. Yet a good deal of the criticism and commentary on Ramos’s work in English dates back to the publication of Ralph E. Dimmick’s 1963 translation, as Barren Lives, and is coloured by the atmosphere of the Cold War. It thus tends to dismiss or downplay Ramos’s political affiliations and their influence on his writing, and to consider his novels in a narrowly regionalist context (as Darlene Sadlier has analysed in a fascinating article).1 The publication of Brandellero and Villares’s wide-ranging and nuanced volume, which both summarizes existing approaches and strikes out in new directions, thus provides a much-needed fillip to English-language scholarship and teaching on this canonical Brazilian author. For those seeking an overview of Ramos’s life and work, the volume provides good coverage of his background and career, in particular the political life of his natal state of Alagoas, in Randal Johnson’s chapter, which offers a useful balance 1 ‘Reading Graciliano Ramos in the United States’, Luso-Brazilian Review, 47.2 (2010), 1–25. Reviews 107 sheet of previous characterizations of Ramos’s political opinions and narrates his political and literary life during his stint as Governor of Palmeira dos Índios and after the 1930 revolution. The volume then moves on to articles analysing the author’s best-known works, focusing particularly, though not exclusively, on his four main novels Caetés, São Bernardo, Vidas secas and Angústia, along with Infância, Ramos’s autobiographical account of his childhood years, and his prison memoir, Memórias do cárcere. All of these texts pick up and extend the ‘psychoanalytic, Marxist and structuralist’ approaches which have dominated scholarship on Ramos. Several of these articles are translations of research originally written (and in three cases, published) in Portuguese. One is from an Italian-language original. The volume thus provides a welcome opening up of Brazilian and international perspectives on Ramos’s work for a monolingual English-language readership. Of particular interest to scholars of Brazilian literature — and those concerned with how the Brazil that Ramos depicted led to the nation still attracting headlines for all the wrong reasons today — are the various proleptic connections made to later writers. These begin in the prefatory form of an interview with leading contemporary Brazilian novelist Luiz Ruffato and conclude with comparative readings of Ramos alongside authors as varied as Clarice Lispector, Silviano Santiago and Milton Hatoum...