Fiction is often grounded in the personal experience of the author. If you say this to Brazilian novelist Milton Hatoum, he will swiftly remind you that he invented his characters, but then add the caveat that certain elements of his own life influence his fiction. In his most recent novel, A noite da espera (Night of Waiting),
that parallel lies in physical space: the first volume in what will be a trilogy is set in 1960s Brasília, when the new capital, still under construction, fell into the grip of authoritarianism after the 1964 military coup. Hatoum lived in the city at that same moment and studied in the same high school as the novel’s narrator, Martim. They wandered through the same enormous, empty Brasília streets. As they tried to live daily life, they watched their classmates get arrested and sometimes disappear into that strange urban landscape. The novel’s tone is deeply intertwined with its setting, inspired by Hatoum’s own fragmented memories from his youth.
Rather than translate a cohesive section of this remarkable example of post-dictatorship fiction and accompany it with a straightforward interview with the author, I found it more appropriate to mirror my translation and the book’s author with the fragmented form of the novel itself, which is filled with letters, allusions, and memories. Milton Hatoum sat down with me, along with Paulo César Gomes, editor of História da Ditadura, in a small coffee shop in São Paulo to discuss fiction, memory, architecture, and politics. I asked him to bring photographs from his childhood in Brasília, and I brought sections of his novel that had caught my attention. He came with a manila envelope of old polaroids and photos along with a large old book of photographs from Brasília that the Federal District Municipal Authority published in 1968. The images and his fragments of fiction inspired our conversation. I recreated the experience later by collaging the images, and attaching to each a quote from the interview and a section of the novel in my English translation.
Choose an image in the collage that calls your attention and click. Experience the quotes from the interview and the novel, like the memory that arises from your subconscious when you see an old photo or visit a place from your childhood. Meander through the memory of the other – that of both fictional Martim and his inventor, Milton Hatoum. Some fragments address the relationship between city space and oppression and the way in which politics are engrained in setting. Others simply capture the human experience of distance, loneliness, and abandonment.
All translations are from the Portuguese by Lara Norgaard. Fiction quotes are from O lugar mais sombrio (The Darkest Place), the first volume in A noite da espera (Companhia das Letras 2017). All quotes from Milton Hatoum are from an interview carried out by Lara Norgaard and Paulo César Gomes on August 24, 2018. Images are either from Milton Hatoum’s personal archives, from the National Archive in Rio de Janeiro, or from the book Brasília – Special Edition, published by the Federal District Municipal Authority in a limited print run in 1968. All efforts were made to find the rights to the photographs published in the volume. Please contact us with any information about the images
Milton Hatoum is a Brazilian novelist born in Manaus in 1952. He lived in Brasília as a teenager before studying architecture at the University of São Paulo. He has won a range of prizes for his fiction, including the prestigious Jabuti Prize for Relato de um certo Oriente (1989), his first novel, and Cinzas do Norte (2005), for which he also was awarded the Bravo!, APCA, and Portugal Telecom prizes. His novel Dois Irmãos (2000), The Brothers, has been translated into twelve languages, including English. In 2017, the French government named Hatoum an Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and he is currently a columnist for the newspapers O Estado de S. Paulo and O Globo.