My last published novel is made up of dialogues without interlocutors-they become weird, allusive, and “incomplete” monologues. How did you decide on that approach? And do you have a favorite monologue, in literature?īERNARDO CARVALHO: I’ve been working a lot with the theater lately. McSWEENEY’S: Your story is composed of one long monologue by the secretary of public safety. McSWEENEY’S: There’s a character in your story, a man we never see, who believes that justice has nothing to do with the truth-that it’s just “theatrics, rhetoric, and acting.” Where did that idea come from?īERNARDO CARVALHO: From a Janet Malcolm book or article. And I think that Rubem Fonseca has re-created the crime story in Brazil, against a backdrop of extreme social violence and dictatorship in the late sixties and seventies, with a very peculiar and "local” style of his own. McSWEENEY’S: Is there a Brazilian author, or a particular Brazilian book, or even a movie or a TV show, that you think takes on the genre particularly well?īERNARDO CARVALHO: I think the best genre writers are those who reinvent the genre. It is, at the same time, very idiotic-he’s very vain, and his actions speak to his simpleton’s idea of power-but it’s also disturbing. I can’t explain exactly why, but I feel like it says a lot about Brazil, a country with very high illiteracy and an uneducated elite: this mastermind of organized crime posing with Dante’s Inferno in his prison cell, as a kind of provocation. I was struck by that image-he used to pose with the book by his side. How much did you think about that, as you were working on this? Do you think a story like this can tell us something about a particular place, or a particular country?īERNARDO CARVALHO: One of the most famous gang leaders in Brazil, who has been kept for years in a high-security prison, used to brag about his love for Dante’s Inferno. McSWEENEY’S: We asked you for a story set in Brazil. The monologue that makes up the story is addressed to some mastermind of organized crime, but it could also be seen as directed at the reader. I’d say that, more than the character or the situation, I was intrigued by the idea of playing with the addressee’s ambiguity. I thought that maybe I could come back to that situation from another point of view for my story here. McSWEENEY’S: So how did you approach the idea of writing a crime story? Did you start with a character, or a particular situation, or something else?īERNARDO CARVALHO: At some point a while back I began writing a love story between a lawyer and his client, but I gave it up pretty quickly.
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