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As with years past, we’re going to spend the next week highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and informative posts that prompt you to read at least a few of these excellent works.

Click here for all past and future posts in this series.

Kafka’s Leopards by Moacyr Scliar, translated by Thomas O. Beebee

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press

Why This Book Should Win: Texas Tech’s “The Americas” series has been quietly putting together a fantastic list of Latin American authors, and this would thrust them (deservedly) into the spotlight. Plus, Scliar died last year, and for some reason that makes me feel like he deserves some special recognition.

Kafka’s Leopards is a short (96 page) novella that happens to be one of the most entertaining books on this year’s longlist. It centers around the character of Mousy, who, when he was growing up near Odessa in the early part of the twentieth century, got involved with a group of Trotskyites, mainly through the influence of his radical friend Yossi. (As you do. I mean, seriously, who wouldn’t want to participate in a revolution?)

In fact, Yossi had met THE Leon Trotsky, and Trotsky had entrusted him carrying out a secret radical act. But when Yossi comes down with a terrible illness, he asks Mousy to stand in for him, and travel to Prague where he’s to meet a revolutionary writer who will give him a message that will explain what he’s supposed to do next.

Anyway, novella-length story short, Mousy loses all the necessary information on the train (revolutionaries are so disorganized) and tries to puzzle out what he’s supposed to do. Which leads him to calling up a one Franz Kafka and asking for the text.

Lots of mistaken identity mishaps ensue, but Mousy is eventually given Kafka’s “Leopards in the Temple” aphorism which he believes he’s supposed to interpret in order to fulfill his mission. In a slick move that draws attention to the situation of translation in an interesting way, Mousy can’t read this and takes it to a old Jewish man at a synagogue who interprets it for him:

He outlined the story in Yiddish. Mousy learned that the leopards broke into the temple and drank the contents of the sacrificial chalices to the last drop; that this was repeated so often that in the end everyone knew it would happen, and that finally the scene became part of the ritual.

Naturally, more mishaps occur, and the adventure-story aspect explodes as Mousy tries to makes sense of this aphorism in a way that connects the text with the city of Prague with the Russian Revolution. Told with a deftness that is both sincere and light with comedy, this part of the novella is extremely fun to read, and must’ve been fun to translate as well. (Goes without saying, seeing that this award focuses on the “best translations,” but Thomas Beebee’s translation is very admirable, mostly for the way in which he emphasizes the sort of joyful, playful tone that runs throughout this book of constant failures.)

To make this more interesting, it’s worth nothing

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Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza. NY: Henry Holt and Co., 2008.
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7960-9
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7960-2

Michael Sedano

Blackout is as good a title as any for this mystery set in Rio de Janeiro’s fabled Copacabana and Ipanema neighborhoods. Sadly, the blackout of the title is more a gimmick than a psychological condition experienced by the suspect. In a typical fictional blackout, a character commits a series of acts then loses memory of having performed the actions. The detectives and the character’s loved ones then must unravel clues then assign responsibility.

But in Blackout, the central character does not suffer blackouts. His problem, really, is not a damaged memory nor situational blindness but a profoundly haunting event that so terrifies him that his memory superimposes visions from that long ago upon events at hand. He acts on what he thinks he sees, then lies and covers up when he later discovers the actuality that confronted him. None of this is a blackout, so why that title?

Maybe it’s translation from some Brazilian Portugese word whose closest English equivalent is “blackout”? (I write this without the book in hand and must depend on memory. I do not remember the translator's name, nor is it listed in the publisher's website). At any rate, “blackout” is not what happens to the Aldo, a successful interior decorator married to a beautiful psychologist.

When Aldo was a boy, a neighborhood bully bloodied the boy’s face. Aldo offered no resistance, no defensive posture, only meek submission to the beating. But the beating has a haunting effect on Aldo. He develops a lifelong fear of meeting up again with that bully. Garcia-Roza fails to develop the background of this terror. Instead, the author shows us one event that foreshadows the novel’s central event.

Some time after the beating, Aldo thinks he spots the bully headed in Aldo’s direction. Terrified at the thought of another meeting, another beating, Aldo cowers behind stacks of merchandise in a small shop until the shopkeeper asks if the boy needs help. Shaking with fear, the boy abandons his hiding place to hesitantly peek out the storefront. No bully. One moment he was on the street, the next, an empty street. Who knows what set off the panic, but the reader understands Aldo has been terrorized by a figment of his imagination.

Years later, Aldo is moving his car during a thunderous rainstorm. Suddenly out of the darkness, an apparition appears to Aldo’s eyes. It is the bully. Isn’t it?

The next morning, a one-legged man is discovered dead, shot in the chest at the top of a hill. Now the mystery begins. How, or why, does a one-legged man make the strenuous trek from flatlands to the cul-de-sac at the top of a steep hill? Who killed him? Why? Aldo and others were at the scene around the time of the murder, but they have no obvious connection to the nameless corpse.

Meanwhile, back at the office, Aldo’s assistant is a hot young beauty named Mercedes. She sets her sights on Aldo and it’s only a matter of crooking her little finger and Aldo is in her bed. The triumphant Mercedes begins scheming to take Aldo from his wife and two kids. To this point, Aldo was a semi-likeable character. Now, seeing how easily he falls into adultery, the reader loses any loyalty to Aldo and is willing to sit back and let bad stuff happen to Aldo.

Aldo’s wife is murdered. But not before the reader sees her in therapy sessions with attractive women, and seemingly crossing the boundary between counselor and lover. How sad to witness three people—Aldo, his wife, and Mercedes the assistant--with such comfortable lives discarding all for a fast fling with a good-looking target.

With a cast of such unattractive, even repellent, characters, the reader cares ever more about Espinosa’s sleuthing. With the wife dead, Espinosa discovers the affair between Mercedes and Aldo. Then a clue here, a clue there, and, almost haphazardly, with only a few pages remaining, Espinosa pins their respective crimes on them.

Blackout is an engaging story but I want to know more about the characters. We see Aldo pushed around as a kid, but have no idea why the boy doesn’t fight back, nor what leads him to be such a ninny that Mercedes finds him easy pickings. We don’t get to see connections between Mercedes’ history and her predatory nature, nor what motivates her to such drastic acts.

There may be a method behind this. Although Blackout has much undeveloped territory, the lacunae help the reader understand the milieu that Inspector Espinosa and his staff work in. Since the reader knows only as much as the detectives, as the case unfolds the reader is forced to set aside logic and causality and simply watch the cops do their job. In the process, the reader will enjoy the delight of discovery and the surprises that Garcia-Roza dishes out. Not a bad trade-off, and one worth picking up the novel for.

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