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Released 40 years ago, Loyola Brandão’s novel predicted environmental crisis

One of the most beautiful images used to explain the power of literature it refers to a small flame that lights up in the darkness. Its light is not capable of illuminating the entire environment, but it allows the reader to perceive the dimension of darkness in which he is immersed.

In these days when the Flip, the biggest literary event in the country, turns its focus to nature, to climate crisis and to the dead by Covid-19, it is important to remember that four decades earlier a Brazilian writer was striking a match in the middle of the pitch.

Exactly 40 years ago, it arrived in bookstores “You will see no country”, romance in which Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, “Literary Personality” of the year at the Jabuti 2021 Award, narrates how our days would be if the Amazon succumb to destruction.

In a futuristic and dystopian São Paulo, people are hungry, the heat is inclement, the animals have gone extinct, and the only available source of water is that produced from the urine of its residents. If today such a scenario does not seem so absurd, at that moment the writer came up with a great novelty.

As is well known, nature has always played a central role not only in Brazilian literature, but throughout Latin America, to the point that Venezuelan writer Pedro Grases even said that nature itself was the true character to impose itself on men in our novels.

In “No Country”, however, nature ceases to be “the enemy’s vegetation”, from which Fabiano and Sinhá Vitória flee in “Vidas Secas”, by Graciliano Ramos, and assumes the position of victim of the same process that destroys lives human beings.

Just the fact of foreseeing the direction of the increasingly accelerated process of deforestation in the forest, at a time when, it is good to remember, only a few scientists denounced such a threat, would be enough to prove that good writers are like seismographs to record the vibrations in society long before they are noticeable.

But in “Thou Shall See No Country”, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão goes even further.

By following the protagonist’s misadventures, Souza, an old compulsory retired university professor, the reader will get to know a government that, guaranteeing that it has ended corruption (the “Era of the Great Locupletation”), frees the Amazon for the exploration of miners and encourages felling of its trees for timber export.

Those who dare to object are called “negativists”, victims of “scientific paranoia”.

Back to their command posts after the last dictatorship, the “militecnos” occupy the best jobs, controlling companies and ministries.

Documents are kept under wraps for two hundred years. And as public universities no longer exist, teachers start to have their classes recorded and military schools train their students based on “ideological neutrality”.

Written at a time when the internet was just a futuristic dream, the country created by Loyola Brandão also seems to anticipate by almost thirty years the chatter that is now so common on social networks.

In this dismal scenario, when a complaint is raised against the shift government, the order becomes talking, talking and talking until the chaos of opinions makes truth and lies mix and the accusations fall into the void.

Not wanting to answer accusations, commanders blame bad news for anything that goes wrong. Those who still dare to protest are classified as “Intolerantly Bored.”

Not by chance, Souza will soon come to the conclusion that only “two things were worse than cancer for the High Hierarchy of the New Army: the negative spirits and the communists”.

The reality foreseen in “Thou Shall See No Country” even goes so far as to point out facts that would only be proven by scientists many years later. In October 2019, for example, at an event held by the Brazil LAB at Princeton University, the results of a study by researchers Stephen Pacala and Elena Shevliakova were presented.

Produced on the supercomputers of the US National Climate Forecasting Laboratory, it shows that, among other catastrophes, even São Paulo, more than three thousand kilometers away, would suffer from the lack of rain if the Amazon ceased to exist.

Exactly 38 years earlier, Souza was already saying:

“The definitive droughts came right after the great Amazon desert. A year without a drop of water and the dams in São Paulo ran out. Terrified, the people made promises, filled the churches”.

Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, in You will see no country

Released on November 25, 1981, “You will not see any country” began to be born eight years earlier, still under the provisional title “A Marquise Extensa”.

Dissatisfied with the initial result, Loyola Brandão dismissed the original, but decided to use the first idea in one of her best-known stories, “O Homem do Holo na Mão”, which would appear in the second edition of “Forbidden Chairs”, in 1979, by Codecri, editor of the newspaper “O Pasquim”.

Time passed, but the idea of ​​narrating a story that takes place when the last tree is felled in Brazil continued to lash the writer’s imagination.

Over the years, Loyola Brandão took notes and gathered news from newspapers and magazines in a gigantic archive with nearly eight hundred items. In 1979, now under the title “The Final Cut”, it was finally time to bring everything together and complete the work begun nearly a decade ago.

Launched on a Thursday, at the then-popular Capitu bookstore, on Rua dos Pinheiros, in São Paulo, the first edition came out with 3 thousand copies – sold out in 5 days.

At that time, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão was already a recognized figure in the world of letters. Journalist with experience in publications such as the newspaper “Última Hora” and the magazine “Realidade”, his novel “Zero”, beginning of a trilogy that would follow with “You will not see any country”, he was celebrated as a great innovation in Brazilian literature – not without before having taken a real tour.

Completed in 1973, but rejected by several Brazilian publishers, its first version would only be made public in 1974, in Italy, with a translation by the writer Antonio Tabucchi and thanks to the action of professor Luciana Stegagno Picchio, from the University of Rome.

Released in Brazil only in 1975, the following year it was censored by the military dictatorship. The definitive arrival at the bookstores would only happen in 1979.

“Zero” emerged in the wake of the advent of what was called a novel-report. In it, Brazilian journalists began to seek, through literature, to circumvent all the limitations imposed by press censorship and, thus, be able to deal with the brute reality of the military regime in vogue.

Inspired by the winds that blew from the United States with its New journalism by Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, in Brazil the genre sinned when it sought to deal with large national issues based on specific cases.

In a kind of return to naturalism, the books resulted in allegorical narratives always marked by the existence of a hero, often embodied in the figure of the journalist himself in search of the “truth”. Mediated by the report format, the experiences left something to be desired as they turned much more towards the outside than towards the world they abdicated from creating and problematizing within the novel.

“Zero”, however, managed to counteract current logic by calling into question not only the heroic figure but also the mass media.

If a good part of his generation colleagues seem not to have listened to Theodor Adorno, for whom the novel needs to focus on what it is not possible to account for through the story, in his novel Ignácio de Loyola Brandão also echoed another conclusion of the German philosopher that the unresolved antagonisms of reality return to works of art as problems immanent in their form.

From a country fragmented by the military dictatorship, an equally fragmented narrative could only emerge.

Back to “You will not see any parents”, if one of the most notable characteristics of the great works of literature is their ability to remain current over time, at the age of 40, the novel by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão proves to be, just like “Zero” , one of the key moments of culture in Brazil.

Started almost half a century ago, the trilogy ended with the release of “Nothing will be left of this land”, except for the wind that blows over it. In the novel, released a year before the appearance of Covid-19, in addition to citizens being watched at all times by cameras, an epidemic wreaks havoc.

We should always pay attention to what Ignácio de Loyola Brandão says.

Check out the Jabuti 2021 Award winning books:

Reference: CNN Brasil

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