Hamid Ismailov and the “Reality Novel”

By Rob Packer

The new novel by Hamid Ismailov

“A Reality Novel” is a bold subtitle for any novel: the very act of writing slices up reality in a particular way, creating lacunae and juxtapositions. It’s an especially bold claim with political subject matter or somewhere relatively unknown, such as Central Asia. In the three months I lived in Kyrgyzstan, it seemed that half the facts were half-false, all lies contained a grain of truth and reality, if it existed, was somewhere in between.

For English-speakers, one of the best people to make sense of the conflicting and interlocking narratives of Central Asia, it’s probably Hamid Ismailov, Uzbek journalist, poet-novelist, BBC World Service Writer in Residence and head of the Central Asia service. In September, Glagoslav—a new publisher of literature in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian—published his 2005 novel, A Poet and Bin-Laden.

Personally, the title feels a little sensationalist (the original Russian means ‘the road to death is greater than death’) and even misleading in a literary world where the Taliban write poetry.

The novel tells the story of Belgi, an internationally-renowned Uzbek poet with an American girlfriend, who leaves Uzbekistan after his brother is murdered by the police. He is delivered to and joins the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in the mountains of Tajikistan; and he is later sent to the Taliban’s Afghanistan to make a (propaganda?) film about Uzbek refugees, where he does briefly encounter Bin-Laden, before being found by American troops in 2001.

Autumn Colours: Orange

By Rob Packer

Autumn Colours: Yellow

By Rob Packer

Rainy Rio

By Rob Packer

British beachgoers look for holidays with “sun, sand and sea”; while Spanish speakers look for “sol, brisa y mar” (sun, breeze and sea). The reason for this should be clear enough for anyone who’s spent any part of the summer staring out over the yellow plains of Castile from Madrid desperately hoping for a breeze; or, on the other hand, to any unsuspecting visitor to Brighton expecting fun with a bucket and spade. I say this from experience: I was taken, unwarned, to Brighton when I was about five and have never forgiven the place for it.

I have no idea what the Portuguese rule of three for the beach is (if you do, please put it in the comments), but what do you do in a city famous for having sol, mar, breeze, sand and everything else, when it’s a rainy day in Rio? The tourist brochures might keep quiet about it, but Rio actually does have double the annual rainfall of somewhere like London. Thankfully this is quite often fast rain, rather than northern Europe’s leisurely drizzle, but cloudy days do come around with about the frequency of, oh, Brazilian public holidays: so much so, that they almost always coincide.

So what to do on a cloudy day in Rio? Some tell me that everyone goes to the mall (true); others that no one knows what to do, stick distraught heads under pillows and stay at home (no way to check); and the hardiest will still go to the beach (they do I’ve checked).

None of these options is really as good as going up into the mountains and seeing how beautiful they are under cloud.

This last weekend added another option: FLUPP, the Literary Festival of the UPPs—an offshoot of FLIP, the Paraty Literary Festival—that aimed to bring literature to Rio’s newly pacified comunidades. The views swept 270º from Corcovado to the airport in the north of the city, but the real action was inside the tents with writers and poets like Manuel Vilas (Spain), Patrícia Portela (Portugal), Kei Miller (Jamaica), Allan da Rosa and Ferreira Gullar (Brazil).

Modern Brazilian Sonnets: Paulo Henriques Britto’s Forms of Nothing

By Rob Packer

Formas do nada by Paulo Henriques Britto

A constant in all (?) European literatures, the sonnet has a long pedigree in Portuguese, ranging from love sonnets by Camões, the language’s equivalent to Shakespeare, Cervantes or Goethe, right down to twentieth-century Brazilian poets, such as Vinícius de Moraes or Mario Quintana. In his collection from March this year, Formas do nada (Forms of Nothing, no English translation), Paulo Henriques Britto, one of Brazil’s leading poets, returns to the form throughout, exploring in half the collection’s poems the sonnet’s Petrarchan, Shakespearean and unrhymed forms, as well as reaching into more unconventional combinations (5-4-3-2, 5-5-4 and the like).

It soon becomes clear how apt the title is: the Forms are specifically poetic in their most traditional and rhyming guise and it is clear that Nothing refers to the subject matter. The first poem is ‘Lorem ipsum’, named after the placeholder text, featured in PowerPoint or WordPress that’s really a nonsense version of text by Cicero. Britto, who is also a translator, includes a “self-translation”, where the speaker promises poetic fireworks:

Boats in Botafogo Bay

By Rob Packer

Yachts in Botafogo Bay at sunset.

Can Money Buy Style?

By Rob Packer

As part of the off-and-on blog series of  ”tourist knick-knacks that are funny until you look at the price tag” (see this silver gorilla on a surfboard in Mexico), here are some tropical birds in semi-precious stones that Brazilian kitschmeisters Amsterdam Sauer keep in their shop at the top of Sugarloaf Mountain.

While the workmanship is evidently impressive, the results show—as with so much in life—that less really is more. A pink bald eagle touching down on an outcrop of quartz (or whatever it may be) might be a bold visual statement, but as far as I’m concerned it  sits somewhere on the line between bathetic and downright hilarious. Well, actually mostly hilarious and I couldn’t help wondering if the strategy behind the shop’s location is that the beautiful view numbs your credit card hand and makes you start thinking about clearing out that space on the mantelpiece for a colourful new addition.

What do you think?