If one were to imagine cities as fabrics, São Paulo, the Brazilian mega-city, would be an unshapely patchwork, a monstrous makeshift sewn of all manner of cloths, coarse weave alongside delicate muslins, loose basting next to tight embroidery, intricate lace beside simple nets. At least this is the image that comes to mind while reading some of the younger authors from São Paulo whose versions of the city differ dramatically in both pattern and texture.
Take Ferréz, for example, the pen name of Reginaldo Ferreira da Silva, a young self-taught author and chronicler of the periphery.
In “A Practical Guide to Hatred” published in 2003, he describes the brutality of daily life and the struggle for survival in the slums. Employing a fast narrative style marked by short, staccato phrases and the rough language of the city outskirts, Ferréz weaves a complex tapestry of relationships. The use of multiple narrators emphasizes the variety of characters that populate the apparently monotonous favelas providing the reader with a window onto the unique perspective of each. Brutal killers, small-time crooks, fervent churchgoers, abandoned wives and corrupt police officers are all caught up in a dense knit of confused knots, interwoven destinies and rough-sewn seams.
In contrast to Ferréz’s coarse fabric, the world of the nine stories of "All Souls' Day" by Marcelo Ferroni (published in 2004) resembles smooth broadcloth.
Acclaimed as "the return of the middle class to Brazilian literature" by the critics, Ferroni’s carefully crafted miniatures describe São Paulo’s Oxford-cloth middle class of white-collar workers and their bosses, families, bodyguards and journalists. But despite appearances, the fine twill of this bourgeois world is marred by tight threads that trap some protagonists in their twists and gaping loops of missed stitches through which others fall into the abyss.
Respectable bank directors lead double lives, family warmth proves to be suffocating, angel-like princesses long for diabolic excesses, victims become torturers.
While the characters of “All Souls’ Day” uncomfortably inhabit the creases of an over-starched normality, the playful fabric of "Lover" by Ana Ferreira, an erotic adventure in 24 chapters published in 2002, is anything but strait-laced.
Ferreira’s protagonist eagerly examines the slippery silks and varied patterns of sensuality, delighting in the intricate snarls of sexual challenge. As antagonist or voyeur, lover or mistress, actor or object, the novel's narrator explores the erotic opportunities she encounters with the lightness and teasing elegance of the finest lingerie.
Paulo Rodrigues, finally, tugs at the threads and frays the urban cloth in his short novel "Along the Tracks", a poetic narrative about the city outskirts published in 2001. Where São Paulo’s dense construction starts to thin, along the outbound roads and railway tracks, two brothers embark on a search for a father whom they never knew.
In this lyrical text, the city limits become a mythical place of transition, between the metropolitan world and what lies beyond it, between youth and maturity, friendship and loss. As the reality of São Paulo becomes more and more remote, the fibres soften and weaken, the joints between the multi-coloured patches loosen and the city patchwork disintegrates.
