The Elegant Variation: GUEST REVIEW: SAMBA DREAMERS

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July 07, 2006

GUEST REVIEW: SAMBA DREAMERS

Samba Dreamers
By Kathleen de Azevedo
University of Arizona Press
304 pp., $17.95 (2006); paperback

GUEST REVIEW BY DANIEL A. OLIVAS

In Samba Dreamers (University of Arizona Press), Kathleen de Azevedo’s debut novel, the opening paragraph sets the magical but brutal tone for this tale of a Brazilian immigrant who attempts to forget a life shattered by torture and murder and begin anew in Los Angeles, circa 1975:

“Clouds brushed the wings of the airplane. José Francisco Verguerio Silva looked out the window and suddenly had the feeling of bursting through the glass, tumbling slowly through white heavenly wisps, and finally colliding with the ground, his long Brazilian name smashing into pieces and scattering. He got up to his feet, sobbing as he looked for all the parts of his name, but he had lost them. He filled out the landing card and gave his passport to the airline attendant. Now he was Joe. Joe Silva. It was all the name he had left.”

Joe wanders out of Los Angeles International Airport, a stranger in a stranger land, and eventually settles into a passenger van owned by Hollywood Celebrity Tours. Befriended by the driver, Joe lands his first job as a dishwasher where he meets Sherri, a waitress who is as American as apple pie. After a flashback-ridden coupling that results in pregnancy, Joe marries Sherri because he believes that it is the honorable thing to do. Joe improves the family income by being tapped to play a Cuban Ricky Ricardo-like character for Hollywood Celebrity Tours showing off the homes of the stars to often bored and sometimes surly tourists.

Elsewhere, Rosea Socorro Katz, the daughter of the late Brazilian bombshell Carmen Socorro (read: Carmen Miranda), is released from the women’s prison and set on a course to collide with Joe’s burgeoning American dream. The reason for Rosea’s incarceration: she had “burned down her husband’s house because of the monkey.” Yes, monkey. Though too complex to explain here, suffice it to say that de Azevedo introduces wonderfully bizarre and often mythological elements that will make the reader laugh, cringe and even shed a tear. She blends the mythos of Hollywood and Brazil while populating her narrative with Amazon warriors, a boy who is part bird, conniving movie producers, and many other odd and grotesque characters.

Rosea is perhaps de Azevedo’s most fully-realized character. This large, wild and clearly unbalanced woman eventually obtains a clerical job at Hollywood Celebrity Tours where she falls desperately and dangerously in love with Joe. Joe’s longing for the Brazil of his dreams is fed by lustful trysts with Rosea in the jungles of Hollywood. Yet Joe also needs stability of the type his wife, Sherri, and twin sons could offer. But Sherri also longs for something more than a marriage based on chivalry with a man who suffers nightmares and mutters in a foreign tongue in the middle of the night.

Samba Dreamers is a dark, fantastical and, indeed, brilliant cautionary tale for those who search out paradise without first confronting—and defeating—their inner demons. If Nathanael West had been Brazilian, The Day of the Locust would have looked a lot like Samba Dreamers. De Azevedo is a remarkable new literary voice.

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of four books including Devil Talk: Stories (Bilingual Press, 2004). He is the editor of Latinos in Lotus Land: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature, forthcoming from Bilingual Press in 2007. His website is www.danielolivas.com and he shares blogging duties on La Bloga. This review first appeared in the El Paso Times.

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen

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*Now in Paperback*

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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The Elegant Variation

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July 07, 2006

GUEST REVIEW: SAMBA DREAMERS

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MY NOVEL

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RECOMMENDED

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

July 07, 2006

GUEST REVIEW: SAMBA DREAMERS

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism