Book review: Ancient Tillage and A Cup of Rage are about resentment and its consequences

The dream-like prose of Raduan Nassar is now available in English - they are truly original works.

Ancient Tillage by Raduan Nassar.

Raduan Nassar was born in São Paulo to Lebanese parents and raised in small rural towns. After studying law and working as a journalist, he turned his hand to writing, publishing a novel, Ancient Tillage, in 1975 and a novella, A Cup of Rage, in 1978.

Despite both books being made into notable Brazilian films, Nassar followed them up with only one other book – a collection of short stories – before abandoning literature for agriculture. For the past three decades, he has lived as a recluse on a remote farm in Brazil.

Nassar’s two main literary works have just been made available for the first time in English and added to the Penguin Modern Classics pantheon.

While reading, and marvelling at, that novel and novella – both of them set on farms in the Brazilian outback, both of them stylistically bold achievements – we are struck by two other feelings: disappointment that Nassar wrote so little, and disbelief that it took so long to render his unique voice into English.

Ancient Tillage is a coming-of-age novel featuring a young man who has endured a turbulent adolescence.

André has grown up on a fazenda and been made to appreciate a life consisting of “The earth, the wheat, the bread, our table and our family”. But one day he breaks free and takes off to live on his own terms. When he finally returns, it is as “the wayward son, the perpetual convalescent”.

André’s remarkable narrative is part-confession to older brother Pedro about his prodigal life, and part-meditation to the reader on his duties, desires and childhood reminiscences. He recalls his father’s prolix sermons, his daily graft in the fields and, crucially, his unconventional relationship with his sister Ana.

We witness his debilitating epileptic seizures, his constant metaphysical struggles, and his wine-fuelled epiphanies (“Ana was my illness, she was my insanity”) and self-loathing (“I was the crazed brother…the one with the slime of so many slugs and the devil’s slobber coating my skin”).

The novel reveals how André’s actions at home and his subsequent departure from it helped to bring about the family’s disintegration.

However, André believes otherwise, and in his warped defence of his actions, we see his feverish mind at work and the full extent of his delusion: “we have become whole within the confines of our own home, confirming Father’s words that happiness is only found in the bosom of the family.”

A Cup of Rage, as its title suggests, also deals with heated emotions. Clocking in at a mere 45 pages, it nevertheless packs in drama, vitriol and linguistic fireworks, and ends up speaking volumes.

A female journalist and an older man meet at an out-of-the-way farmhouse. But it soon sours into hatred. A romantic exchange becomes a cruel, attritional slanging match which exposes bitter truths and a lust for dominance.

Translating Nassar cannot have been easy but Stefan Tobler and K S Sotelino have risen to the challenge and done an admirable job. Both novel and novella unfold in long, looping, page-devouring sentences.

When those trains of thought finally come to a halt it is usually a temporary break or a deceptive end as denoted by a semi-colon; then we are off again on another highly-charged, ideas-rich tangent, tirade or trip down memory lane.

From one page to the next, Nassar’s prose can change shape, going from hard-hitting and splenetic to lyrical and sensual, to dream-like and hallucinatory.

At times it comes studded with allusion to the poems of Fernando Pessoa. Scenes of bucolic calm replete with pastoral imagery give way to strange parables, bouts of delirium and rigorous soul-searching.

In Ancient Tillage we delve into André's mindset, realise the rashness of his homecoming and wait for the explosive consequences; we read A Cup of Rage wondering if that anger will overflow and cause both lovers to come to blows.

Nassar’s intensity of thought, together with his treatment of matters rustic and erotic, bring to mind D H Lawrence.

His virtuosic language and enigmatic characters are redolent of that other luminous Brazilian talent, Clarice Lispector. But these kindred spirits are really only distant echoes.

For the most part, these two dazzling, intoxicating books are the work of one original mind. Yes, an English translation is overdue, but better to have it late than not at all.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer based in Edinburgh.