brazilian bilingual book club| joÃo gilberto noll ... · late-joao-gilberto-noll/ ) a translation...

2017- Celebrating the love of reading Brazilian literature

The year of #lovetoreadBrazil

©BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB – CULTURAL SECTION - EMBASSY OF BRAZIL IN LONDON All rights reserved - Creator & Convenor -©Nadia Kerecuk

14-16 Cockspur Street London SW11Y 5BL

http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xml

BRAZILIAN BILINGUAL BOOK CLUB| JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL |ATLANTIC HOTEL|

20th JUL 6.30-9 PM 2017- the year of #lovetoreadBrazil

Hotel Atlântico (1989)

translated as

Atlantic Hotel (1997 & 2017)







Allow yourself to experience this effervescent and quirky surreal poetic journey in the company of the idiosyncratic unnamed narrator

& expect the unexpected!

Is this minimalist novel an innovative non-thriller thriller? Or a sort of littérature engage narrative or …?

Is the main character fleeing the world or his own self?

A punctilious wordsmith, Noll chooses his words structuring his

discourse and subtly co-opting his reader to fill in the gaps….

Some passages are reminiscent of Clarice Lispector, Noll’s ‘goddess’ as greatly admired her craft!

You will find echoes of Dalton Trevisan’s crisp micro-short-story-

telling & themes in Noll’s Atlantic Hotel.

A challenging journey into some of the innermost hidden nooks of the human mind and psyche.

Walking in the glorious gardens of the celebrated Charleston in early autumn during the Small Wonder Festival before Noll’s short story

reading evening, the author mulled over his novels and short stories & on his aversion to being pigeonholed and labelled confiding how disquieted he was that his favourite work Atlantic Hotel had been neglected in the UK adding that there might be a new translation.

(27th Sept 2014).

The intellectual atmosphere in which Atlantic Hotel was written in 1989 needs to be contemplated as it was a year of momentous events,

which would change the world for good: the USSR perestroika was in full swing & The Gulag Archipelago was finally published in Russia, Tiananmen Square shocked everybody, the fall of the Berlin Wall set

off a domino effect, fatwa on Rushdie’s Satanic Verses pointed







towards new forms of censorship & Brazil welcomed the consolidation of return to democracy and arrival of human rights &

more …

A special homage to the recently deceased master of prose and one of Brazil’s leading literary icons.

DETAILS OF AVAILABLE PUBLICATIONS: ENGLISH 1997 Hotel Atlantico (Brazilian contemporaries) translated by David Treece, London:

Boulevard Books. ISBN-10: 1899460659 ISBN-13: 978-1899460656 2017 Atlantic Hotel translated by Adam Morris, San Francisco, CA: Two Lines Press. ISBN-10: 1931883602 & ISBN-13: 978-1931883603

PORTUGUESE

Various editions available from various publishing houses. e.g. ISBN: 9788526503250

SHORT HISTORY OF THE BOOK AND TRANSLATIONS

Atlantic Hotel was the fifth book published by the author in 1989. Most of João

Gilberto Noll’s novels feature a nameless protagonist enmeshed in various seemingly

abstract pursuits with a salient muteness or scarce speech interspersed with ancillary

scenes of sexual nature. There is a metaphysical dimension, an investigation of

categories of being in a fast-moving reality of the late 20th century. The nameless

narrator regularly seeks out a solution for some inscrutable or undefined issue

associated with himself in the loneliness of urban environments. There is a cinematic

narrative structure with flashes highlighting episodes often seemingly disjointed, and

at times with a musical background, and deeply introspective.

It is worth considering how the publishing house Rocco described the novel.

The first paragraph of the back cover blurb tells a potential reader that it is a story of

a lonely man travelling to the south of Brazil in search of answers to the various issues

he has been facing. The clues are covert and the traveller plays hide-and-seek with

death. The blurb highlights the fact that the reader is led to reflect on various facets of







the human condition without being directly aware of the fact. It seems that the

publishers had a challenge on their hands given the novelty of this novella, as the

author seems to have written a thriller, which actually was an anti-thriller and

expanded it by adding a metaphysical reflective level.

First edition by Francisco Alves Publishing House







Atlantic Hotel is usually considered as Noll’s best-known novel in Brazil and its

adaptation to cinema may have contributed to its popularity. Suzana Amaral (1928-),

the film director who became famous for her adaptation of the Hour of the Star by

Clarice Lispector, adapted Hotel Atlântico as road-movie and innovated in the

narrative style using a novel cinematic language. The film adaptation was released in

November 2009, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3FPOd7KgzA .

The first translation into English appeared as Hotel Atlantico (Brazilian

contemporaries) by David Treece, published by Boulevard Books in London in 1997.

It appeared with the following sale pitch on the cover, ’Violence, desperation, love &

sex – on the existentialist trip into the mental and geographic interior of Brazil’ and I

is still sold with the following somewhat wide of the mark blurb:

‘Hotel Atlantico (sic!)’, is a sexy, existentialist trip into the Brazilian interior.

Full of violence, desperation and love, the novel plumbs the psyche of this

nation to explore the soul of Brazil in the 20th century.’

http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xmlhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3FPOd7KgzA






A second translation into English, Atlantic Hotel, by Adam Morris, was published by Two Lines Press, San Francisco, CA, in May 2017. The author had hinted that a new and better translation would be forthcoming and he hoped the reception would be much better. NK accompanied the author at the 2014 Small Wonder Literary Festival, which is about short stories (Rio Brio: Tatiana Salem Levy, João Gilberto Noll and L. Greaves with Susie Nicklin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fprOuTLEXF4 ) and also organized the Autumn Literary event of the Embassy of Brazil in London in which Noll and Paulo Scott participated in 2014.

http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xmlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fprOuTLEXF4






Adam Morris gave an account of how he came to translate Noll by trying to

find novels at second-hand bookshops (sebos) in Rio de Janeiro and came across a

copy of O quieto animal da esquina (2004), which he translated as Quiet Creature on the

Corner (2016), in an interview with Katrine Dobson in 2016. There is a reference to

Adam Morris’s views on translating Noll and Brazilian literature in the Literary Hub

(a website created by independent publisher Grove Atlantic and American books

site Electric Literature, launched in 2015) which published a conversation

‘Investigating the brilliance of the late João Gilberto Noll’, a week after the passing of

the author on 6th April 2017. (http://lithub.com/investigating-the-brilliance-of-the-

late-joao-gilberto-noll/ )

A translation of Atlantic Hotel into Spanish was published in 2014 and an Italian

translation is being prepared with a translation grant of the Brazilian National Library.

Reviews of the translation into English often conflated with a commentary on

the other works of the author have been appearing especially following the death of

the author earlier this year. Many of the reviewers continue falling into the trap of the

anachronistic practice of comparing Brazilian authors to other internationally known

authors. One finds all sorts of comparisons of Noll’s works with other authors as if a

justification was required to say that his oeuvre deserves to be read, enjoyed and

translated. The author would certainly have been rather dismayed that his works were

being categorized to fit certain niches. Noll sought originality and evolved throughout

his working career and was very much attuned with the moment in which he lived.

A very good piece of the series ‘A writer in the Library’, which although published in

2012 by the journal Cândido of the Paraná Public Library, continues as one of the most

insightful overviews of the author (in Portuguese) offering good insights about

influences, motivations and principles which had underpinned Noll’s literary

creations.

BIOGRAPHY

JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL (1946-2017)

http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xmlhttp://www.lithub.com/http://www.groveatlantic.com/http://electricliterature.com/http://lithub.com/investigating-the-brilliance-of-the-late-joao-gilberto-noll/http://lithub.com/investigating-the-brilliance-of-the-late-joao-gilberto-noll/






JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL, the fourth of six children of João and Ecila Noll, was born on 15th April 1946 in Porto Alegre, capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. In 1953, he started the Colégio São Pedro of the Marist Brothers and, in 1954, started piano lessons. He started his university degree at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Belles Lettres) in 1967, but dropped out in 1969 and moved to Rio de Janeiro where he began to work for the newspapers Folha da Manhã and Última Hora. In 1970, he published his first short story in the anthology Roda de Fogo, edited by Carlos Jorge Appel, of the Editora Movimento (Porto Alegre). He then moved to São Paulo, working for the Companhia Editora Nacional (The Brazilian Publishing Company) revising texts. In the following year, he returned to Rio de Janeiro writing about literature, theatre and music for Última Hora. In 1974, he resumed his studies at the faculty of Letters of the Notre Dame Faculty in Rio de Janeiro. In 1975, he started lecturing at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio and obtaining his degree in 1979. In 1980, he published his first book, O cego e a dançarina and was







awarded the prizes ‘Revelação do Ano’ from the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte, ‘Ficção do Ano’ from Instituto Nacional do Livro and the JabutiPrize of the Câmara Brasileira do Livro. In 1981, he published A Fúria do Corpo.

In 1982, he was awarded a writer’s fellowship by the Iowa University and published an anthology of new Brazilian short story writers in Germany in 1983. The filmmaker Murilo Salles (1950 -) adapted his short story Alguma coisa urgentemente to film entitled Nunca fomos tão felizes in 1984. Next, Noll published his novel Bandoleiros (1985) and in 1986 he returned to his home town Porto Alegre, publishing the novel Rastros do Verão and reprinted his short story book O cego e a dançarina. He was awarded another Jabuti Prize in 1987 for his book A Céu Aberto. In 1988, he receives a scholarship from the Vitae Foundation and published his novel Hotel Atlântico in 1989.

This was followed by O Quieto Animal da Esquina (1991), Harmada (1993) awarded another Jabuti Prize for it. In 1994, he coordinated a number of literary workshops at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In 1996, he spent a month as visiting author at the University of California and in 1997 was invited to lecture on Brazilian Literature at the Berkley Campus of the University of California. In 1998, published micro short stories twice a week - Instantes Ficcionais, in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, from August 1998 to December 2001.

His next novel Canoas e Marolas was published in 1999 and from 2000 to 2003 published two micro short stories in a column under the title Relâmpagos in the Folha de S. Paulo, subsequently published as an anthology Mínimos Múltiplos Comuns.

In 2002 he is awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Prize and published his novel Berkeley em Bellagio. In 2004, he came to the King's College, London, as the writer-in-residence (2 months) and penned the novel Lorde.

Mínimos Múltiplos Comuns was awarded the Brazilian Academy of Letters Fiction Prize in 2004 and Jabuti Prize for the best cover. In 2004, he started writing longer short stories for the Correio Braziliense and the short story book A máquina do ser (2006) was published receiving prizes as the best short story book of the year from the ‘Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte’ (APCA) in 2007 and the Prêmio Bravo! Prime.







The novel Acenos e Afagos was published in 2008 and in 2009 it was awarded the second place in the Portugal Telecom Prize, followed by the Fato Literário 2009 Prize.

In October 2009, he visited Spanish and British universities to discuss the translation of his books. More publications follow Sou eu!, O nervo da noite (2009) and Anjo das ondas (2010). In the same year, he travelled to the USA as a writer-in-residence at the Universities of Chicago and Maddison and lectured at the Autonomous Mexican University and returned to Brazil as an artist-in residence at the University of Campinas. In May 2011, the author travelled to Lisbon, Portugal, for the "A Cidade aTravessa: poesia dos lugares", at the Fernando Pessoa house inaugurating a cycle ‘A night with Fernando Pessoa’ as the first author to sleep in Pessoa’s bedroom and producing texts which would eventually become a book. He also spoke in Buenos Aires and gave readings in Germany. The novel Solidão continental was published in 2012 and the following year he attended the Jerusalem International Book Fair launching the translation of his book Bandoleiros into Hebrew and attended literary cafes in Tel-Aviv. He also participated in the Massachusetts University Conference on Portuguese Language Literatures and spoke at Brown University. He visited the UK in 2014 at the invitation of the Small Wonder Literary Festival at Charleston and, along with the author Paulo Scott, he spoke about his work at the Embassy of Brazil. The author passed away on 29th March 2017.







Record Publishing House Photo

Author’s site: http://www.joaogilbertonoll.com.br/index.html contains details about articles and dissertations written about his oeuvre, publications, photos, etc Sources in Portuguese: http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa16801/joao-gilberto-noll

http://www.ims.com.br/ims/explore/artista/joao-gilberto-noll

Article 29th Mar 2017 - fellow authors on the passing of J. G. Noll http://blog.estantevirtual.com.br/2017/03/29/morre-aos-70-anos-o-escritor-gaucho-joao-gilberto-noll/

http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xmlhttp://www.joaogilbertonoll.com.br/index.htmlhttp://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa16801/joao-gilberto-nollhttp://www.ims.com.br/ims/explore/artista/joao-gilberto-nollhttp://blog.estantevirtual.com.br/2017/03/29/morre-aos-70-anos-o-escritor-gaucho-joao-gilberto-noll/http://blog.estantevirtual.com.br/2017/03/29/morre-aos-70-anos-o-escritor-gaucho-joao-gilberto-noll/






Small Wonder Festival 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fprOuTLEXF4 & http://www.charleston.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/SMALL-WONDER-2014-proof-6.pdf Embassy of Brazil London Autumn Literary Events Sept 2014 http://culturalbrazil.org/2014/08/21/joao-gilberto-noll-paulo-scott-special-readings-24-september/

Commentaries and reviews: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2017/05/10/unbearable-transience-review-atlantic-hotel-joao-gilberto-noll-joseph-schreiber/ https://theculturetrip.com/south-america/brazil/articles/why-joao-gilberto-noll-may-be-the-brazilian-literary-sensation-weve-been-waiting-for/

https://upclosed.com/people/joao-gilberto-noll/

https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/remembering-joaeo-gilberto-noll-

adam-morris

http://lithub.com/investigating-the-brilliance-of-the-late-joao-gilberto-noll/ )

Film adaptation- Suzana Amaral:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3FPOd7KgzA

Attendance is free, but booking is essential: [email protected]

©Nadia Kerecuk Creator and Convenor of the © Brazilian Bilingual Book Club of

the Embassy of Brazil in London
http://londres.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us/book_club.xmlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fprOuTLEXF4http://www.charleston.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/SMALL-WONDER-2014-proof-6.pdfhttp://www.charleston.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/SMALL-WONDER-2014-proof-6.pdfhttp://culturalbrazil.org/2014/08/21/joao-gilberto-noll-paulo-scott-special-readings-24-september/http://culturalbrazil.org/2014/08/21/joao-gilberto-noll-paulo-scott-special-readings-24-september/http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2017/05/10/unbearable-transience-review-atlantic-hotel-joao-gilberto-noll-joseph-schreiber/http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2017/05/10/unbearable-transience-review-atlantic-hotel-joao-gilberto-noll-joseph-schreiber/https://theculturetrip.com/south-america/brazil/articles/why-joao-gilberto-noll-may-be-the-brazilian-literary-sensation-weve-been-waiting-for/https://theculturetrip.com/south-america/brazil/articles/why-joao-gilberto-noll-may-be-the-brazilian-literary-sensation-weve-been-waiting-for/https://upclosed.com/people/joao-gilberto-noll/http://lithub.com/investigating-the-brilliance-of-the-late-joao-gilberto-noll/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3FPOd7KgzAmailto:[email protected]

brazilian bilingual book club| joÃo gilberto noll ... · late-joao-gilberto-noll/ ) a translation...

Documents