| As negas malucas de Mia Couto |
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Entrevista | Mia Couto Em novo romance, 'Venenos de Deus, remédios do Diabo: as incuráveis vidas de Vila Cacimba', o escritor moçambicano fala de incesto, religião e saudade Mariana Filgueiras
Os moradores da Vila Cacimba, onde se passa o novo romance do escritor moçambicano Mia Couto –Venenos de Deus, remédios do Diabo – poderiam viver parede e meia com os da Vila do Meio-Dia, do lendário musical Gota d'água, de Paulo Pontes e Chico Buarque. Poderiam até ter organizado protestos em grupo. Fosse Atlântico o oceano que banha o lado da África onde fica Maputo, Deolinda, a mulata do romance africano, poderia até ter trocado segredos com Esmeralda, a mulata de Mar morto, de Jorge Amado. A familiaridade das histórias contadas pelo escritor, em que um médico, Sidónio Rosa, apaixona-se pela bela Deolinda, em meio à sua conturbada ausência, é instantânea. Faz lembrar a proximidade que há entre Brasil e os países lusófonos, não só pela língua – agora ainda mais, pelo acordo ortográfico – mas também pelos temas. Mia venceu a guerra civil moçambicana e evolui em uma trama repleta de universalidade: incesto, política, religião, dores de saudades. De onde vieram Bartolomeu, Munda, Sidónio Rosa, Deolinda... Como as histórias sopraram-lhe o ouvido? – Nunca sabemos onde se localizam os personagens que criamos. São vozes, são ecos que moram no fundo de nós, moram na fronteira entre sonho e a realidade. No meu caso, estes personagens corporizam alguns fantasmas relacionados com o sentimento do tempo e o facto de, pela primeira, tropeçar naquilo que se chama "idade". A aproximação com a oralidade, neste Venenos de Deus, remédios do Diabo, é o traço mais forte da sua literatura, hoje? – A oralidade é dominante na sociedade moçambicana. Mas não é o território da oralidade, em si mesmo, que me interessa. È a zona de fronteira entre o universo da escrita e a lógica da oralidade. Essa margem de trocas é que é rica. Você diz que já é mais velho que o próprio país independente. Neste romance, o tema colonial é o pano de fundo das "incuráveis vidas da Vila Cacimba". A colônia deixou de ser personagem? – A colônia nunca foi personagem. Eu creio que, não apenas na literatura, mas no imaginário dos moçambicanos, esse passado colonial foi bem resolvido. É preciso pensar que a independência de Moçambique se deu como resultado de uma luta armada que criou rupturas de cultura bem sedimentadas. O tema da guerra civil esgotou-se? (Não é uma cobrança, só uma provocação...) – Já antes a guerra civil se havia esgotado. No O Outro pé da sereia ele já surge. No fundo, você sempre escreve sobre o mesmo tema? – Escrevi 23 livros, todos tratam de temas diversos. Existe, sim, uma preocupação central em toda a minha escrita: é a negação de uma identidade pura e única, a aposta na procura de diversidades interiores e a afirmação de identidades plurais e mestiçadas. De que maneira percebe o ranço colonial na literatura dos países lusófonos? – Não há ranço. O passado está bem resolvido. O romancista é o historiador do seu tempo? – Em certos momentos, sim. Por exemplo, depois da guerra civil os moçambicanos tiveram um esquecimento colectivo, uma espécie de amnésia que anulava os demônios da violência. Os escritores visitaram esse passo e resgataram esse tempo, permitindo que todos tivéssemos acesso e nos reconciliássemos com esse passado. "As formas de expressão usam-se quando se tem medo de dizer a verdade", diz a sabedoria bruta de Munda, personagem do livro. O escritor diz a verdade? – O escritor é um mentiroso que apenas diz a verdade. Porque ele anuncia como uma falsidade aquilo que é a sua obra. Um brasileiro, ao ler um romance de Moçambique, ganha riquezas sobretudo de linguagem. Você acha que a língua portuguesa tem a perder com o acordo ortográfico? – As línguas nunca perdem. Os acordos apenas tocam numa camada epidérmica, num lado convencional que não é o coração do idioma. |
BANCA DE TEXTO. UMA BIBLIOTECA PESSOAL. BY/PAR/POR STARK! Uma grinalda de Andrea Carvalho STARK
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mia couto ( I loooove him!!!!!)
Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir, has decided to publish The Original of Laura, the novel his dying father commanded be destroyed
Natasha
by Vladimir Nabokov June 9, 2008
On the stairs Natasha ran into her neighbor from across the hall, Baron Wolfe. He was somewhat laboriously ascending the bare wooden steps, caressing the bannister with his hand and whistling softly through his teeth.
"Where are you off to in such a hurry, Natasha?"
"To the drugstore to get a prescription filled. The doctor was just here. Father is better."
"Ah, that's good news."
She flitted past in her rustling raincoat, hatless.
Leaning over the bannister, Wolfe glanced back at her. For an instant he caught sight from overhead of the sleek, girlish part in her hair. Still whistling, he climbed to the top floor, threw his rain-soaked briefcase on the bed, then thoroughly and satisfyingly washed and dried his hands.
Then he knocked on old Khrenov's door.
Khrenov lived in the room across the hall with his daughter, who slept on a couch, a couch with amazing springs that rolled and swelled like metal tussocks through the flabby plush. There was also a table, unpainted and covered with ink-spotted newspapers. Sick Khrenov, a shrivelled old man in a nightshirt that reached to his heels, creakily darted back into bed and pulled up the sheet just as Wolfe's large shaved head poked through the door.
"Come in, glad to see you, come on in."
The old man was breathing with difficulty, and the door of his night table remained half open.
"I hear you've almost totally recovered, Alexey Ivanych," Baron Wolfe said, seating himself by the bed and slapping his knees.
Khrenov offered his yellow, sticky hand and shook his head.
"I don't know what you've been hearing, but I do know perfectly well that I'll die tomorrow."
He made a popping sound with his lips.
"Nonsense," Wolfe merrily interrupted, and extracted from his hip pocket an enormous silver cigar case. "Mind if I smoke?"
He fiddled for a long time with his lighter, clicking its cogged screw. Khrenov half-closed his eyes. His eyelids were bluish, like a frog's webbing. Graying bristles covered his protruding chin. Without opening his eyes, he said, "That's how it'll be. They killed my two sons and heaved me and Natasha out of our natal nest. Now we're supposed to go and die in a strange city. How stupid, all things considered. . . ."
Wolfe started speaking loudly and distinctly. He spoke of how Khrenov still had a long time to live, thank goodness, and how everyone would be returning to Russia in the spring, together with the storks. And then he proceeded to recount an incident from his past.
"It was back when I was wandering around the Congo," he was saying, and his large, somewhat corpulent figure swayed slightly. "Ah, the distant Congo, my dear Alexey Ivanych, such distant wilds—you know . . . Imagine a village in the woods, women with pendulous breasts, and the shimmer of water, black as karakul, amid the huts. There, under a gigantic tree—a kiroku—lay orange fruit like rubber balls, and at night there came from inside the trunk what seemed like the sound of the sea. I had a long chat with the local kinglet. Our translator was a Belgian engineer, another curious man. He swore, by the way, that, in 1895, he had seen an ichthyosaur in the swamps not far from Tanganyika. The kinglet was smeared with cobalt, adorned with rings, and blubbery, with a belly like jelly. Here's what happened—"
Wolfe, relishing his story, smiled and stroked his pale-blue head.
"Natasha is back," Khrenov quietly and firmly interjected, without raising his eyelids.
Instantly turning pink, Wolfe looked around. A moment later, somewhere far off, the lock of the front door clinked, then steps rustled along the hall. Natasha entered quickly, with radiant eyes.
"How are you, Daddy?"
Wolfe got up and said, with feigned nonchalance, "Your father is perfectly well, and I have no idea why he's in bed. . . . I'm going to tell him about a certain African sorcerer."
Natasha smiled at her father and began unwrapping the medicine.
"It's raining," she said softly. "The weather is terrible."
As usually happens when the weather is mentioned, the others looked out the window. That made a bluish-gray vein on Khrenov's neck contract. Then he threw his head back on the pillow again. With a pout, Natasha counted the drops, and her eyelashes kept time. Her sleek dark hair was beaded with rain, and under her eyes there were adorable blue shadows.
II
Back in his room, Wolfe paced for a long time, with a flustered and happy smile, dropping heavily now into an armchair, now onto the edge of the bed. Then, for some reason, he opened a window and peered into the dark, gurgling courtyard below. At last he shrugged one shoulder spasmodically, put on his green hat, and went out.
Old Khrenov, who was sitting slumped on the couch while Natasha straightened his bed for the night, observed indifferently, in a low voice, "Wolfe has gone out to dinner."
Then he sighed and pulled the blanket more tightly around him.
"Ready," Natasha said. "Climb back in, Daddy."
All around there was the wet evening city, the black torrents of the streets, the mobile, shiny cupolas of umbrellas, the blaze of shopwindows trickling down onto the asphalt. Along with the rain the night began to flow, filling the depths of the courtyards, flickering in the eyes of the thin-legged prostitutes, who slowly strolled to and fro at the crowded intersections. And, somewhere above, the circular lights of an advertisement flashed intermittently like a spinning illuminated wheel.
Toward nightfall, Khrenov's temperature had risen. The thermometer was warm, alive—the column of mercury climbed high on the little red ladder. For a long time he muttered unintelligibly, kept biting his lips and gently shaking his head. Then he fell asleep. Natasha undressed by a candle's wan flame, and saw her reflection in the murky glass of the window—her pale, thin neck, the dark braid that had fallen across her clavicle. She stood like that, in motionless languor, and suddenly it seemed to her that the room, together with the couch, the table littered with cigarette stubs, the bed on which, with open mouth, a sharp-nosed, sweaty old man slept restlessly—all this started to move, and was now floating, like the deck of a ship, into the black night. She sighed, ran a hand across her warm bare shoulder, and, transported partly by dizziness, lowered herself onto the couch. Then, with a vague smile, she began rolling down and pulling off her old, oft-mended stockings. Once again the room started floating, and she felt as if someone were blowing hot air onto the back of her head. She opened her eyes wide—dark, elongated eyes, whose whites had a bluish sheen. An autumn fly began to circle the candle and, like a buzzing black pea, collided with the wall. Natasha slowly crawled under the blanket and stretched, sensing, like a bystander, the warmth of her own body, her long thighs, and her bare arms thrown back behind her head. She felt too lazy to douse the candle, to shoo away the silken formication that was making her involuntarily compress her knees and shut her eyes. Khrenov gave a deep groan and raised one arm in his sleep. The arm fell back as if it were dead. Natasha lifted herself slightly and blew toward the candle. Multicolored circles started to swim before her eyes.
I feel so wonderful, she thought, laughing into her pillow. She was now lying curled up, and seemed to herself to be incredibly small, and all the thoughts in her head were like warm sparks that were gently scattering and sliding. She was just falling asleep when her torpor was shattered by a deep, frenzied cry.
"Daddy, what's the matter?"
She fumbled on the table and lit the candle.
Khrenov was sitting up in bed, breathing furiously, his fingers clutching the collar of his shirt. A few minutes earlier, he had awakened and was frozen with horror, having mistaken the luminous dial of the watch lying on a chair nearby for the muzzle of a rifle motionlessly aiming at him. He had awaited the gunshot, not daring to stir, then, losing control, started screaming. Now he looked at his daughter, blinking and smiling a tremulous smile.
"Daddy, calm down, it's nothing. . . ."
Her naked feet softly shuffling on the floor, she straightened his pillows and touched his brow, which was sticky and cold with sweat. With a deep sigh, and still shaken by spasms, he turned toward the wall and muttered, "All of them, all . . . and me, too. It's a nightmare. . . . No, you mustn't."
He fell asleep as if falling into an abyss.
Natasha lay down again. The couch had become even bumpier, the springs pressed now into her side, now into her shoulder blades, but at last she got comfortable and floated back into the interrupted, incredibly warm dream that she still sensed but no longer remembered. Then, at dawn, she awoke again. Her father was calling to her.
"Natasha, I don't feel well. Give me some water."
Slightly unsteady, her somnolence permeated by the light-blue dawn, she moved toward the washbasin, making the pitcher clink. Khrenov drank avidly and deeply. He said, "It will be awful if I never return."
"Go to sleep, Daddy. Try to get some more sleep."
Natasha threw on her flannel robe and sat down at the foot of her father's bed. He repeated the words "This is awful" several times, then gave a frightened smile.
"Natasha, I keep imagining that I am walking through our village. Remember the place by the river, near the sawmill? And it's hard to walk. You know—all the sawdust. Sawdust and sand. My feet sink in. It tickles. One time, when we travelled abroad . . ." He frowned, struggling to follow the course of his own stumbling thoughts.
Natasha recalled with extraordinary clarity how he had looked then, recalled his fair little beard, his gray suède gloves, his checkered travelling cap that resembled a rubber pouch for a sponge—and suddenly felt that she was about to cry.
"Yes. So that's that," Khrenov drawled indifferently, peering into the dawn mist.
"Sleep some more, Daddy. I remember everything."
He awkwardly took a swallow of water, rubbed his face, and leaned back on the pillows. From the courtyard came a cock's sweet throbbing cry.
III
At about eleven the next morning, Wolfe knocked on the Khrenovs' door. Some dishes tinkled with fright in the room, and Natasha's laughter spilled forth. An instant later, she slipped out into the hall, carefully closing the door behind her.
"I'm so glad—Father is a lot better today."
She was wearing a white blouse and a beige skirt with buttons along the hips. Her elongated, shiny eyes were happy.
"Awfully restless night," she continued rapidly, "and now he's cooled down completely. His temperature is normal. He has even decided to get up. They've just bathed him."
"It's sunny out today," Wolfe said mysteriously. "I didn't go to work."
They were standing in the half-lit hall, leaning against the wall, not knowing what else to talk about.
"You know what, Natasha?" Wolfe suddenly ventured, pushing his broad, soft back away from the wall and thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his wrinkled gray trousers. "Let's take a trip to the country today. We'll be back by six. What do you say?"
Natasha stood with one shoulder pressed against the wall, also pushing away slightly.
"How can I leave Father alone? Still, though . . ."
Wolfe suddenly cheered up.
"Natasha, sweetheart, come on—please. Your dad is all right today, isn't he? And the landlady is nearby in case he needs anything."
"Yes, that's true," Natasha said slowly. "I'll tell him."
And, with a flip of her skirt, she turned back into the room.
Fully dressed but without his shirt collar, Khrenov was feebly groping for something on the table.
"Natasha, Natasha, you forgot to buy the papers yesterday. . . ."
Natasha busied herself brewing some tea on the alcohol stove.
"Daddy, today I'd like to take a trip to the country. Wolfe invited me."
"Of course, darling, you must go," Khrenov said, and the bluish whites of his eyes filled with tears. "Believe me, I'm better today. If only it weren't for this ridiculous weakness . . ."
When Natasha had left he again started slowly groping about the room, still searching for something . . . With a soft grunt he tried to move the couch. Then he looked under it—he lay prone on the floor, and stayed there, his head spinning nauseatingly. Slowly, laboriously, he got back on his feet, struggled over to his bed, lay down . . . And again he had the sensation that he was crossing some bridge, that he could hear the sound of a lumber mill, that yellow tree trunks were floating, that his feet were sinking deep into the moist sawdust, that a cool wind was blowing from the river, chilling him through and through. . . .
IV
"Yes—all my travels . . . Oh, Natasha, I sometimes felt like a god. I saw the Palace of Shadows in Ceylon and shot at tiny emerald birds in Madagascar. The natives there wear necklaces made of vertebrae, and sing so strangely at night on the seashore, as if they were musical jackals. I lived in a tent not far from Tamatave, where the earth is red, and the sea dark blue. I cannot describe that sea to you."
Wolfe fell silent, gently tossing a pinecone with his hand. Then he ran his puffy palm down the length of his face and broke out laughing.
"And here I am, penniless, stuck in the most miserable of European cities, sitting in an office day in, day out, like some idler, munching on bread and sausage at night in a truckers' dive. Yet there was a time . . ."
Natasha was lying on her stomach, elbows widespread, watching the brightly lit tops of the pines as they gently receded into the turquoise heights. As she peered into this sky, luminous round dots circled, shimmered, and scattered in her eyes. Every so often something would flit like a golden spasm from pine to pine. Next to her crossed legs sat Baron Wolfe in his ample gray suit, his shaved head bent, still tossing his dry cone.
Natasha sighed.
"In the Middle Ages," she said, gazing at the tops of the pines, "they would have burned me at the stake or sanctified me. I sometimes have strange sensations. Like a kind of ecstasy. Then I become almost weightless, I feel I'm floating somewhere, and I understand everything—life, death, everything. . . . Once, when I was about ten, I was sitting in the dining room, drawing something. Then I got tired and started thinking. Suddenly, very rapidly, in came a woman, barefoot, wearing faded blue garments, with a large, heavy belly, and her face was small, thin, and yellow, with extraordinarily gentle, extraordinarily mysterious eyes. . . . Without looking at me, she hurried past and disappeared into the next room. I was not frightened—for some reason, I thought she had come to wash the floors. I never encountered that woman again, but you know who she was? The Virgin Mary . . ."
Wolfe smiled.
"What makes you think that, Natasha?"
"I know. She appeared to me in a dream five years later. She was holding a child, and at her feet there were cherubs propped on their elbows, just like in the Raphael painting, only they were alive. Besides that, I sometimes have other, very little visions. When they took Father away in Moscow and I remained alone in the house, here's what happened: On the desk there was a small bronze bell like the ones they put on cows in the Tyrol. Suddenly it rose into the air, started tinkling, and then fell. What a marvellous, pure sound."
Wolfe gave her a strange look, then threw the pinecone far away and spoke in a cold, opaque voice.
"There is something I must tell you, Natasha. You see, I have never been to Africa or to India. It's all a lie. I am now nearly thirty, but, apart from two or three Russian towns and a dozen villages, and this forlorn country, I have not seen anything. Please forgive me."
He smiled a melancholy smile. He suddenly felt intolerable pity for the grandiose fantasies that had sustained him since childhood.
The weather was autumnally dry and warm. The pines barely creaked as their gold-hued tops swayed.
"An ant," Natasha said, getting up and patting her skirt and stockings. "We've been sitting on ants."
"Do you despise me very much?" Wolfe asked.
She laughed. "Don't be silly. After all, we are even. Everything I told you about my ecstasies and the Virgin Mary and the little bell was fantasy. I thought it all up one day, and after that, naturally, I had the impression that it had really happened. . . ."
"That's just it," Wolfe said, beaming.
"Tell me some more about your travels," Natasha asked, intending no sarcasm.
With a habitual gesture, Wolfe took out his solid cigar case.
"At your service. Once, when I was sailing on a schooner from Borneo to Sumatra . . ."
V
A gentle slope descended toward the lake. The posts of the wooden jetty were reflected like gray spirals in the water. Beyond the lake was the same dark pine forest, but here and there one could glimpse a white trunk and the mist of yellow leaves of a birch. On the dark-turquoise water floated glints of clouds, and Natasha suddenly recalled Levitan's landscapes. She had the impression that they were in Russia, that you could only be in Russia when such torrid happiness constricts your throat, and she was happy that Wolfe was recounting such marvellous nonsense and, with his little noises, launching small flat stones, which magically skidded and skipped along the water. On this weekday there were no people to be seen; only occasional cloudlets of exclamation or laughter were audible, and on the lake there hovered a white wing—a yacht's sail. They walked for a long time along the shore, ran up the slippery slope, and found a path where the raspberry bushes emitted a whiff of black damp. A little farther, right by the water, there was a café, quite deserted, with nary a waitress or a customer to be seen, as if there were a fire somewhere and they had all run off to look, taking with them their mugs and their plates. Wolfe and Natasha walked around the café, then sat down at an empty table and pretended that they were eating and drinking and an orchestra was playing. And, while they were joking, Natasha suddenly thought she heard the distinct sound of real orange-hued wind music. Then, with a mysterious smile, she gave a start and ran off along the shore. Baron Wolfe ponderously loped after her. "Wait, Natasha—we haven't paid yet!"
Afterward, they found an apple-green meadow, bordered by sedge, through which the sun made the water gleam like liquid gold, and Natasha, squinting and inflating her nostrils, repeated several times, "My God, how wonderful . . ."
Wolfe felt hurt by the unresponsive echo and fell silent, and, at that airy, sunlit instant beside the wide lake, a certain sadness flew past like a melodious beetle.
Natasha frowned and said, "For some reason, I have a feeling that Father is worse again. Maybe I should not have left him alone."
Wolfe remembered seeing the old man's thin legs, glossy with gray bristles, as he hopped back into bed. He thought, And what if he really does die today?
"Don't say that, Natasha—he's fine now."
"I think so, too," she said, and grew merry again.
Wolfe took off his jacket, and his thickset body in its striped shirt exhaled a gentle aura of heat. He was walking very close to Natasha; she was looking straight ahead, and she liked the feel of this warmth pacing alongside her.
"How I dream, Natasha, how I dream," he was saying, waving a small, whistling stick. "Am I really lying when I pass off my fantasies as truth? I had a friend who served for three years in Bombay. Bombay? My God! The music of geographical names. That word alone contains something gigantic, bombs of sunlight, drums. Just imagine, Natasha—that friend of mine was incapable of communicating anything, remembered nothing except work-related squabbles, the heat, the fevers, and the wife of some British colonel. Which of us really visited India? . . . It's obvious—of course, I am the one. Bombay, Singapore . . . I can recall, for instance . . ."
Natasha was walking along the very edge of the water, so that the child-size waves of the lake plashed up to her feet. Somewhere beyond the woods a train passed, as if it were travelling along a musical string, and both of them stopped to listen. The day had become a bit more golden, a bit softer, and the woods on the far side of the lake now had a bluish cast.
Near the train station, Wolfe bought a paper bag of plums, but they turned out to be sour. Seated in the empty wooden compartment of the train, he threw them at intervals out the window, and kept regretting that, in the café, he had not filched some of those cardboard disks you put under beer mugs.
"They soar so beautifully, Natasha, like birds. It's a joy to watch."
Natasha was tired; she would shut her eyes tightly, and then again, as she had been in the night, she would be overcome and carried aloft by a feeling of dizzying lightness.
"When I tell Father about our outing, please don't interrupt me or correct me. I may well tell him about things we did not see at all. Various little marvels. He'll understand."
When they arrived in town, they decided to walk home. Baron Wolfe grew taciturn and grimaced at the ferocious noise of the automobile horns, while Natasha seemed propelled by sails, as if her fatigue sustained her, endowed her with wings and made her weightless, and Wolfe seemed all blue, as blue as the evening. One block short of their house, Wolfe suddenly stopped. Natasha flew past. Then she, too, stopped. She looked around. Raising his shoulders, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his ample trousers, Wolfe lowered his light-blue head like a bull. Glancing sideways, he said that he loved her. Then, turning rapidly, he walked away and entered a tobacco shop.
Natasha stood for a while, as if suspended in midair, then slowly walked toward the house. This, too, I shall tell Father, she thought, advancing through a blue mist of happiness, amid which the street lamps were coming alight like precious stones. She felt that she was growing weak, that hot, silent billows were coursing along her spine. When she reached the house, she saw her father, in a black jacket, shielding his unbuttoned shirt collar with one hand and swinging his door keys with the other, come out hurriedly, slightly hunched in the evening fog, and head for the newsstand.
"Daddy," she called, and walked after him. He stopped at the edge of the sidewalk and, tilting his head, glanced at her with his familiar wily smile.
"My little rooster, all gray-haired. You shouldn't be going out," Natasha said.
Her father tilted his head the other way, and said very softly, "Dearest, there's something fabulous in the paper today. Only I forgot to bring money. Could you run upstairs and get it? I'll wait here."
She gave the door a push, cross with her father, and at the same time glad that he was so chipper. She ascended the stairs quickly, aerially, as in a dream. She hurried along the hall. He might catch cold standing there waiting for me. . . .
For some reason, the hall light was on. Natasha approached her door and simultaneously heard the susurration of soft speech behind it. She opened the door quickly. A kerosene lamp stood on the table, smoking densely. The landlady, a chambermaid, and some unfamiliar person were blocking the way to the bed. They all turned when Natasha entered, and the landlady, with an exclamation, rushed toward her. . . .
Only then did Natasha notice her father lying on the bed, looking not at all as she had just seen him, but a dead little old man with a waxen nose. ♦
(Circa 1924. Translated, from the Russian, by Dmitri Nabokov.) SOURCE The New Yorker , June 5, 2008
Hay festival: Is America still the home of the short story?
John Freeman
Hay festival: Is America still the home of the short story?
Lorrie Moore in Manhattan. Photograph: Lisa Carpenter
In publishing circles it's taken on the shape of an urban legend. So much so that one of the first questions posed to Lorrie Moore at Hay this week was propped unsteadily upon its back. "I work in publishing in England," an audience member began. "And we have this idea that in America the environment is much more receptive to short fiction. Is that really the case?"
It is - and it isn't. Most collections in America are published on university presses, with small print runs for pocket-change advances. Many writers cannot make a living writing them. Most major magazines have cut the space in which they run them. Most bookstores stock story collections in limited numbers, and most readers don't read them. Every year most major book awards overlook short fiction.
All that said America has three things that Britain doesn't have which keeps our audience for short stories alive. For starters, we have a magazine and literary journal culture. Besides the New Yorker, Harper's and The Atlantic, all of which still publish fiction, there are hundreds of literary journals in the US in which a writer can (try to) publish a story.
There are glorious old publications - like the Virginia Quarterly Review - which put out early work by Nadine Gordimer; experimental journals, like Fence, where a story can look more like a lyric essay; new journals, like McSweeney's, where new voices and old maestros mix, and hundreds of journals associated with the universities which teach creative writing: the Louisville Review, the Harvard Review, the Kenyon Review.
This constellation of university programmes produces far more writers than can be published, and all of them practice on the short story. This means there needs to be writers to teach them - and authors from the UK, such as VS Pritchett, Frank O'Connor and Julian Barnes have been among those to do this job.
Not long ago, there was a rather bogus debate over whether these MFA programmes were creating a certain kind of writer. Hanif Kureishi recently compared these programmes to mental institutions. Clearly some schools are better than others, but the idea that they produce a certain kind of writer is rubbish. Iowa Writer's Workshop, the most famous program in the US, can claim as graduates Jane Smiley, James Michener, Flannery O'Connor, and Andre Dubus, who someday should be rediscovered in England the way Richard Yates was recently.
But it's not just workshop graduates who write stories in the US - virtually all of America's major writers do so too. John Updike, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx and Edward P Jones all debuted in the story and have continued to publish them. Going back further, writers who came of age in the era of the slicks - when a writer really could make a living off writing stories - wrote numerous short stories, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, Vonnegut and Katherine Anne Porter.
Of course, many of Britain's major writers have also written and published short stories - AL Kennedy, Will Self and Ian McEwan all debuted in the form, while notable collections have been released by writers as diverse as VS Naipaul, Rose Tremain and Ben Okri. But aside from publications such as Granta and Prospect, the stories are not published in an environment where stories are part of a public's weekly reading experience. No one ever got rich writing them.
The days when one could do so in America are long gone, but the echoes of that era still exist in the cultural institutions they have inspired. America has annual anthologies, such as the Best American Short Stories, which regularly sell over 100,000 copies a year, as well as prizes for stories and workshops galore. Occasionally a collection strikes a cord and people buy it. Ethan Canin's The Emperor of Air was a bestseller, as was Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, while Jhumpa Lahiri's latest collection, "Unaccustomed Earth," which is tremendous, debuted on the "New York Times" list at number one (you can read an extract here).
Lahiri's phenomenal success in the form is still, of course, an aberration. In response to the publisher's question from the audience, Moore ultimately argued that Lahiri's book of stories was such a phenomenal success because the publisher believed in it (and because it's also a very good book). Both are true. But Lahiri is also standing atop a short story writing tradition that goes back, as she pointed out at her event in Hay, all the way back to Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the realm of literary history, it is perhaps the only arena in which America has Britain beat.
O acordo ortográfico
Com a aprovação pelo Parlamento de Portugal - por ampla maioria de 230 votos a 3, apesar dos protestos liderados por intelectuais daquele país -, o acordo que unifica a ortografia em todos os países de língua portuguesa, já aprovado pelo Brasil, vai finalmente tornar-se realidade. Mas não imediatamente. Em Portugal isso acontecerá dentro de um período de adaptação de seis anos, e no Brasil, em três anos, a contar de 1º de janeiro de 2009.
O longo tempo necessário para vencer as resistências - o acordo foi assinado em 1990 - não tem relação com as mudanças, que a rigor são modestas. Por exemplo, no que se refere às mudanças da língua em Portugal, desaparecem o "c" e o "p" mudos, em palavras como acção, adopção e óptimo. Com exceção dos nomes próprios derivados, o trema deixa de existir. O hífen não será mais usado quando o segundo elemento começar com "r" ou "s". O acento circunflexo não será usado em palavras terminadas com hiato "oo", como em voo e enjoo, e o acento agudo em palavras terminadas em "eia" e "oia", como ideia e jiboia.
Apesar do alcance limitado da reforma, haverá exceções. Os portugueses continuarão a escrever "António" e "género" com acento agudo, e os brasileiros, com circunflexo. Será mantido o "c" de "facto" em Portugal, porque lá "fato" é roupa.
Por isso, do ponto de vista puramente lingüístico - a reforma tem outras dimensões que é preciso considerar -, é difícil compreender a resistência que ela encontrou em Portugal. Como a norma escrita em Portugal terá 1,42% de suas palavras mudadas e a do Brasil apenas 0,43%, os mais extremados chegaram a falar em submissão a "interesses brasileiros". A opinião do deputado lusitano Mota Soares expressa bem esse sentimento: "A língua portuguesa é o maior patrimônio que Portugal tem no mundo."
O problema é que essa língua, em conseqüência da epopéia da expansão portuguesa, há muito deixou de ser patrimônio exclusivo de Portugal - tal como o inglês, o espanhol e o francês deixaram de pertencer apenas à Inglaterra, à Espanha e à França. Churchill, numa de suas tiradas famosas, disse que os ingleses e os americanos eram dois povos separados pela mesma língua. É natural e inevitável que a "mesma língua" tenha experimentado mudanças ao ser transplantada para a América. Essas mudanças não impedem que ela continue essencialmente a "mesma", seja o português do Brasil, o inglês dos norte-americanos, o espanhol dos hispano-americanos ou francês dos canadenses do Quebec.
Os brasileiros e os outros povos de língua portuguesa só têm a ganhar com a disciplina e o rigor que ela tem em Portugal. Desde que se evite a tentação de fazer com que essa disciplina e esse rigor sufoquem as características ditadas pela evolução da língua fora do ambiente original português. Não é realista recusar a contribuição dos 190 milhões de brasileiros - no total, o português é falado por 230 milhões de pessoas - para a língua, como acabou por reconhecer sensatamente o Parlamento português.
O acordo é na verdade mais importante do ponto de vista político - e também do dos negócios - do que do lingüístico, embora este tenha provocado mais barulho. Ele deve permitir o fortalecimento dos países de língua portuguesa nos organismos internacionais. Não por acaso, um dos principais argumentos utilizados pelos defensores do acordo foi justamente o de facilitar a redação de documentos internacionais em português. É evidente que grafias diferentes dificultam a aceitação de tratados e acordos, que com elas não podem conviver, pois tanto quanto possível têm de evitar imprecisões e ambigüidades.
Finalmente, a unificação ortográfica, apesar de acanhada, cria boas oportunidades de negócios para as editoras brasileiras e portuguesas. A presidente da Câmara Brasileira do Livro, Rosely Boschini, acha que se abre um novo mercado para as editoras brasileiras, o dos países africanos lusófonos, até aqui amplamente dominado por Portugal.
Mas é bom não esquecer que os portugueses têm grande tradição e experiência nesse ramo de negócios e vão, com certeza, não apenas defender a posição dominante que têm na África, como tentar conquistar fatias do mercado brasileiro. Será uma concorrência acirrada e saudável.
estado de sp 25 de maio de 2008
Reforma ortográfica
Reforma ortográfica
A EVIDÊNCIA maior de que o acordo ortográfico da língua portuguesa carece de prioridade está nos 18 anos decorridos entre a sua assinatura e a aprovação pelo país de origem do idioma, Portugal. Com a ratificação pelo Parlamento luso, cai a última grande barreira para sua adoção. A nova ortografia torna-se assim uma realidade, por menos que agrade.
Há, com efeito, várias razões para crítica. A maior parte das modificações parece cosmética, para não dizer ociosa. Que importância pode ter omitir ou não a consoante muda em "óptimo", como se usa em Portugal, ou sacar o acento agudo de "idéia", empregado no Brasil? A ausência de padronização em documentos oficiais e livros decerto não impede sua compreensão.
Diante da pequenez da mudança e de sua irrelevância, é descomunal a energia a despender na assimilação das novas regras pela população dos quatro países -Brasil, Cabo Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe e, agora, Portugal- da Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa (CPLP) que já adotaram o acordo de modo oficial; faltam ainda Angola, Timor Leste, Guiné-Bissau e Moçambique.
Isso sem contar, por certo, a necessidade de refazer matrizes de inúmeros dicionários e livros didáticos. Ou mesmo de inutilizar os já impressos, dependendo do prazo fixado para vigência da nova ortografia. Portugal estipulou prazo de seis anos para tanto, e poderia ter ido além.
No Brasil, a implantação definitiva ainda depende de decreto presidencial, mas o Ministério da Educação já determinou que em 2010 estejam adaptadas todas as obras incluídas nos programas de aquisição de livros didáticos. Um esforço gigantesco.
Mesmo não sendo boa idéia, a nova ortografia está aí. Ótimo seria se o governo brasileiro seguisse o de Portugal, abandonando a pressa injustificável.
FOLHA DE SP 25 de maio de 2008
Estrangeiros não precisam mais falar o 'inglês da rainha'
Entrevista
David Graddol: lingüista britânico
Ao contratar, diz ele, patrão não quer sotaque e vocabulário impecáveis, mas habilidade concreta de usar idioma no trabalho
Ricardo Westin
Falante nativo do inglês, o lingüista e pesquisador britânico David Graddol avisa aos alunos estrangeiros que já não faz sentido sofrer estudando para ter vocabulário de Shakespeare e pronúncia de BBC.
"Você não precisa mais ter o 'inglês da rainha'. As circunstâncias práticas do mundo estão menos focadas nisso", explicou ele ao Estado. "Na hora de contratar, os patrões não ficam impressionados se você fala como nativo. Querem saber se você sabe usar o inglês como instrumento de trabalho. Até porque, em muitos casos, o diálogo será entre pessoas que não têm o inglês como língua materna."
O inglês global - esse idioma que é falado por estrangeiros e que não procura ser perfeito - foi o tema central da palestra dada por Graddol, há dez dias, numa conferência para educadores latino-americanos realizada em São Paulo pela Latin American British Cultural Institutes (Labci), pelo British Council e pela Cultura Inglesa.
Durante sua palestra, porém, ao afirmar que o inglês casto está ficando para trás na comunicação internacional, o lingüista evitou a expressão "inglês da rainha". Quem estava na platéia, como convidada de honra, era a princesa Anne, filha da rainha Elizabeth II.
O que é o inglês global?
É o inglês como língua franca, um idioma que não pertence a ninguém e é usado na comunicação entre pessoas de diferentes locais. Várias forças espalharam o inglês pelo mundo, como a colonização britânica na América e na Ásia e o avanço da influência dos EUA durante a Guerra Fria. Atualmente, o que impulsiona o inglês global é a necessidade da comunicação por razões econômicas. O fenômeno mais próximo disso ocorreu na Europa durante a Idade Média, com o latim, que era a língua dos acadêmicos, dos cientistas, dos religiosos...
Em que esse inglês global difere do falado na Inglaterra e nos EUA?
Diferentemente daquilo que as pessoas imaginam, o inglês global não é uma variedade de inglês, não é um sotaque. É um fenômeno que vai muito além disso. Tem a ver com a aplicação prática da língua, os motivos para aprendê-la, que habilidades ela pode dar. Já não adianta ir a um curso convencional e aprender o inglês geral. Na hora de contratar, os patrões não ficam impressionados se você fala como um nativo, não se preocupam com precisão de vocabulário. Eles querem saber se você, em inglês, consegue persuadir alguém, vender um produto, negociar, estabelecer confiança. Enfim, se você sabe usar o inglês como instrumento de trabalho.
Isso é um fenômeno recente?
Sim. Até pouco tempo atrás, o falante nativo era visto universalmente como o melhor professor de inglês. Hoje chegamos à conclusão de que você não precisa mais ter o "inglês da rainha". As circunstâncias práticas do mundo estão menos focadas nisso. Em certos momentos, o fato de o inglês não sair perfeito chega a ser uma vantagem, porque ajuda a criar confiança quando o diálogo é entre falantes não nativos. Se você fala muitíssimo bem, o interlocutor fica inseguro e até mesmo defensivo em relação ao seu próprio nível de inglês.
As escolas de inglês já se dão conta dessa nova realidade?
Muitas sim. A Noruega, por exemplo, recentemente fez uma mudança no currículo das escolas secundárias. A língua inglesa passou a ser encarada como uma ferramenta que os noruegueses vão utilizar com outros falantes não nativos. E, de fato, a maior parte da comunicação é dessa maneira.
O sr. se sente incomodado quando ouve o inglês falado mal?
Não, mas há muitos britânicos que ficam incomodados quando ligam para um serviço telefônico e quem atende é um indiano. Apesar de se queixaram do inglês que o atendente fala, o ressentimento vem, na realidade, do fato de muitos empregos estarem sendo transferidos da Grã-Bretanha para a Índia. E veja que dado interessante: um pesquisador observou que muitos não nativos jamais vão conseguir pronunciar o "th" (o som, que não existe no português, é produzido com a língua entre os dentes) e concluiu que isso faz pouca diferença na comunicação. Então por que passamos tantas horas em salas de aula do mundo inteiro tentando fazer com que os alunos pronunciem um "th" impecável? Por outro lado, existem pessoas que não pronunciam a última sílaba das palavras em inglês, o que - isso sim - compromete a comunicação. Devemos aprender a gastar o tempo com coisas que realmente importam.
Quem é:
David Graddol
Nascido na Inglaterra, ele é lingüista, pesquisador, consultor e escritor especializado no inglês como língua estrangeira
É autor dos livros English Next e The Future of English?
Nessa área, realizou pesquisas para entidades do governo britânico, como a BBC e o British Council
The philosophy of physiognomy
The philosophy of physiognomy
Hairy thighs, thick feet and other ways in which the Greeks judged character
What do George W. Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton have in common? Their higher education began with posture photos, in the nude or underclothes. Both will have been required on first arriving – the one at Yale, the other at Wellesley – to strip for three snaps: front, back and side views. It was standard practice in the East Coast colleges of their time, confirmed to me by three distinguished United States academic friends of the relevant age. Yes, they all had to submit.
Officially, the idea was that the pictures would reveal which students needed remedial treatment for poor posture. In reality, the project was to correlate the students' undergraduate posture with their success or failure in later life. As the evidence accumulated, it would become possible to predict the Presidential chances of each year's intake. He's got what it takes, has she? All this from a momentary glimpse of the person whose future (together perhaps with all our futures) is at risk if a wrong diagnosis is made. Professor W. H. Sheldon of Columbia University, the éminence grise behind these programmes, was eventually disgraced and his research project abandoned. The ultimate inspiration had been Francis Galton, the eugenicist founder of Social Darwinism, who proposed a similar photo archive for the entire British population. We should be grateful to our present masters for confining their identity card scheme to mug shots with our clothes on.
It is an ancient dream, this idea of an instant diagnosis of someone's character or skills:
"Black hair announces cowardice and great craftiness, excessively yellow and pale white hair, such as the Scythians and Celts have, reveals ignorance and clumsiness and wildness, and that which is gently yellow points towards an aptitude for learning, gentleness, and skill in art. Unmixed fiery hair like the flower of a pomegranate is not good, since for the most part their characters are beastlike and shameless and greedy. Legs which are very hairy with thick black hair indicate slowness at learning and wildness. Those whose loins and thighs have lots of hair separately from the other parts of the body are very lascivious."
Tosh, you may say – and rightly. A good half of Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul, edited by Simon Swain, some 332 pages, is filled with the stuff, in ancient Greek and Latin, medieval Arabic, and modern English translation. A huge effort (and considerable Leverhulme funding) has gone into this beautifully produced, collaborative project on ancient Greek physiognomy and its reception in medieval Islamic society. Does the other half, on the history and interpretation of this massive repository of tosh, redeem the enterprise?
In part it does – but how large a part may depend on your interests. The index, a paltry eight and a half pages, has no entry for "hair" to help a curious reader discover why lots of hair on their loins and thighs would signify lasciviousness: the reason, to be found in an Arabic version of the Greek treatise just quoted, is that it matches the hair distribution found in billygoats. Those 332 pages are largely taken up by different versions, or partial versions, of the same lost treatise: one Greek version, one Latin, and two Arabic (both newly edited for this volume), all of it translated into English for the first time. The centre of attention, the writer of the lost treatise and so the ultimate originator of most of the material under study, is Polemon of Laodicea (cad 88–144), a leading figure in the politics and literature of the period known as "the Second Sophistic".
What survives of Polemon's original Greek is just one sentence: "Eyes that are moist and shine like pools reveal good characters". This fragment is neither indexed nor quoted as such anywhere in Swain's massive tome. It does occur, almost verbatim, in one of the texts printed, a later Greek adaptation of Polemon's book by Adamantius the Sophist (third or fourth century ad), where it is followed by the explanation "For such are the eyes of children". A tiny footnote, easy to overlook, is the only indication readers are given that this is the Master's voice. The index does have an entry "Polemon's Physiognomy, general: eye, importance of", but no contributor to the volume wonders about the destructive implications for physiognomy of the Rousseauesque thought that children might start life innately good. Physiognomy, by the very meaning of the word, claims to be the art of discerning the underlying and unalterable "nature" (in Greek, the physis) one is born with. So if the eyes of children reveal good character, all those nasty traits which physiognomy loves to discern in grown-ups must have been acquired some time after birth. In which case, physiognomy is impossible!
The other, complementary half of the book consists of six interpretative essays, three on Antiquity (around 200 pages) and three on Islam (less than 100). All are impressive, especially the longest: 105 wonderfully acute and original pages by George Boys-Stones on the ancient philosophers' dealings with physiognomy. My focus here is on the editor's contribution, which aims to situate Polemon and his Physiognomy in its original historical context.
Swain's opening claim is that physiognomy is placed "firmly within the culture of inspection and moral evaluation that is visible in so much of the literature of Polemon's time and is arguably a product of the competition and rivalry of elite life". He conjures a society in which everyone is constantly watching and appraising everyone else, and in which there is a "widespread assumption among all classes that physiognomical assessment really worked". Very properly, Swain does not suggest that the social context of the Second Sophistic explains the popularity of physiognomy in Polemon's day. Physiognomy in ancient Greece is first firmly attested for the much earlier and quite different society of democratic Athens in the fourth century BC, while the most striking public evidence for physiognomy's appeal and respectability cited in Swain's book is a memorial epigram from the third century BC: "This is the tomb of Eusthenes: he was a professional physiognomist / Adept at knowing the mind from the eye". But Swain does seem to endorse the idea that Polemon's tosh worked well both for him and for others of his day. He writes, for example, "Someone like Polemon needed the assurance of knowing what his colleagues were about" and "Others evidently found Polemon's treatise practical". It is not evident at all. Maybe the book was simply a fun read.
My main worry is that Swain never addresses the point I began from, that the supposed art of physiognomy offers an instant, short-cut diagnosis of character, which is importantly different from the way people ordinarily learn about each other's character and morals – by observing and interacting with them over time.
To bring out the difference, here are two more passages from the book. The first is a late Latin version of Polemon on the subject of feet, the second an extract from near the end of the so-called Leiden Polemon, a manuscript which is our best witness to the original Arabic translation of his treatise:
"If the bottoms of the feet have distinctive tendons and clear joints, they reveal a noble and manly character. Soft feet which are surrounded with ample flesh show a soft and feminine character. Thick and short feet indicate a very wild character. Excessively long feet show a man who is intent upon many forms of deceit and who contemplates destruction."
That is tosh, like the stuff about hair already quoted. Soles are no guide to souls, any more than body hair is. Contrast this narrative of a "physiognomical insight" (so says the English translation of the Arabic) at a wedding in Smyrna:
"I said to a group of those around me that this bride would be abducted that night and married before she reached her husband. So we set off with the bride until she entered the house of her husband, and in it were the men lying in wait with whom she had an appointment. I will mention to you the signs by which I made the judgement. I saw a young man from the people of that town walking with the husband of that bride. I looked at his face and saw that his eyes were green. I listened to his speech, and I looked at his walk, build, and his personality. I perceived he was disguising a deed he wanted to do, and he was like one overcome by the object of his intent. He was supple of limb and quick in movement and speech, as if he was about to do something. When he looked at the husband of the bride, he looked with anger. I looked at the bride, and she laughed without laughter, the action of a sad person, who feigns joy but is not joyful. When I saw that in his face, I looked at those young men around him to see if there was one of them similar to him in appearance and build. I did not see anything of that in any of them, whereupon I judged what I judged."
That is not tosh (except for the sneer about green eyes). But neither is it physiognomy in the original sense: the supposed art of inferring innate character traits from the soles of the feet, a hairy back, or other bodily features which are fixed from the day we are born, or, as we would say, by our genes. In this sense, if physiognomy is possible, character is similarly determined by inheritance. What this passage describes is something quite else, an inference to a young man's intention to abduct the bride who loves him, not the husband she is pledged to marry. That is neither an inference from inherited bodily features nor an inference to the young man's character. It is an inference from expressive bodily behaviour to his present mood and intended future action. Which is not physiognomy at all.
True, it may come under the Arabic term firãsa. As Robert Hoyland explains and illustrates in his chapter on the Islamic background to Polemon's treatise, the Arabic has much wider scope than the corresponding Greek. Yet, the anonymous Latin Physiognomy (third or fourth century ad, translated here by Ian Repath) reports that not only Polemon, but also an earlier Peripatetic physiognomist called Loxus, expressly affirmed that physiognomy "can even predict some things in the future". The claim is ambiguous. It is obvious that knowing someone's character enables one to predict in a general way what sorts of things they are likely or liable to do. That's just what it is to know someone's character, whether the knowledge derives from physiognomic diagnosis of their bodily parts or normal acquaintance with their habitual behaviour. But the Smyrna wedding story has Polemon claim to predict quite particular actions on that very day. Readers should be amazed at the sophist's perspicuity. And that, no doubt, was the effect his book was chiefly aiming at.
Simon Swain, editor
SEEING THE FACE, SEEING THE SOUL
Polemon's "Physiognomy" from classical antiquity to medieval Islam
699pp. Oxford University Press. £95.
978 0 19 929153 3
M. F. Burnyeat is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of Aristotle's Divine Intellect, 2008, and The "Theaetetus" of Plato, 1990.
a little bit long but worth reading
From Mr Average ... to superman
Sunday May 18, 2008
The Observer
What's inside looks like oily urine. 1cc of Equipoise - a veterinary drug normally injected into beef cattle - and 2cc of Testosterone Cypionate: 10 times the testosterone a man my size produces naturally in a week.
It was going into my backside; plenty of meat there. But the sciatic nerve radiates from my hips; plus, if I hit a vein I could go into cardiac collapse. I tucked a bag of frozen corn beneath my underwear to numb the injection site. The hash marks on the syringe were smudged away by my sweaty hands. That couldn't be a sign of quality medical equipment, could it?
What if I died in this shitty apartment in Iowa City? I pictured the landlord stumbling upon my body, rotten and bloated. The newspaper headline: Dumbshit Canadian Found Dead with Needle in Ass.
The needle slid in so easily I wasn't aware it'd broken the skin. I aspirated and injected into the deep tissue. When I pulled it out a pressurised stream of blood spurted halfway across the room.
A while ago I wrote a novel. A lot of first-time novelists don't stray far from home: their stories are drawn from their lives. This holds true for me: the main character is... well, me. That's not quite true: he's wealthier, pampered, more intolerant and dismissive. But his deep-seated fears, his inborn weaknesses - those things we share intimately.
My character goes down dark roads. For the sake of the book, I thought I'd travel those roads with him. He begins to work out obsessively. I began to work out obsessively. He joins a boxing club. I joined a boxing club. He takes steroids. I took steroids.
The thing is, I've never done drugs, so I lacked the ability to spot the dealer in a room. Such was my quandary when it came to steroids. Where to buy? Who to ask? I'd heard your local gym was a good place, but I didn't have a clue how to go about that. So I typed 'steroids' into Google, which promptly introduced me to an internet scam. I bought a bottle of what I thought was a steroid called Dianabol. But what I received was Dianobol, which, for all I know, were rat turds pressed into pill form. I won't go into detail about how I came to possess real steroids - or 'gear', as we 'roiders call them. The whole thing makes me look as stupid as I was. Suffice to say, the process involved an encrypted email account, a money order wired to Tel Aviv, and weeks of apprehension (had I been ripped off? Would agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration break down my door?) before a package arrived - pill and ampules and six vials wrapped in X-ray-proof paper.
Anabolic steroids hit US gyms in the early Sixties, courtesy of Dr John Ziegler, the American team doctor at the 1954 World Weightlifting Championships in Austria. He watched in horror as his athletes were decimated by a legion of hulking Soviet he-men who, he later found out, received testosterone injections as part of their training regime. Ziegler teamed up with a pharmaceutical firm to create the synthetic testosterone Methandrostenolone, better known by its trade name, Dianabol.
The biological function of anabolic (tissue building) steroids like Dianabol is to stimulate protein synthesis - that is, to heal muscles more quickly and effectively. New muscle is gained by tearing the long, tube-like fibres that run the length of our muscle; protein molecules attach to the broken chains, creating new muscle. While on steroids, your muscle fibres become greedy, seeking out every stray protein molecule.
At first nobody was willing to credit Ziegler's creation for the amazing gains glimpsed in the first test subjects. Nobody - not least the weightlifters themselves - could get their heads around the idea that a tiny pink pill could be responsible for their newfound strength: lifters added 30lb to their bench press and 50 to their hack squats virtually overnight. These lifters had been taking vitamins for years; they knew the value of pills was minimal. The only thing that convinced them was when Ziegler cut off the supply: the lifters surrendered all their gains and lost the feeling of euphoria experienced while on the programme.
As the Sixties progressed and the results became known, steroids made their way from the hardcore weightlifting gyms of North America into mainstream society, trickling down into baseball clubhouses, Olympic training facilities, and health clubs. Though Dianabol is still perhaps the most popular, today's users can choose from over 40 steroids in the form of pills, patches, creams, and injectable compounds from A (Anavar) to W (Winstrol). Illegal unless prescribed, it is still estimated that one in every 100 people in North America have experimented with steroids at some point in their lives.
I had a misconception that being 'on steroids' involved the ingestion or injection of a single substance, but that was quickly dispelled. Many steroids on their own are either singular of purpose or not terribly effective. This is where 'stacking' comes in: you can put on mass (75mg of testosterone), promote muscle hardness (50mg of Winstrol) and keep water retention to a minimum (50mg of Equipoise). This stack is injection-intensive: Testosterone and Equipoise twice weekly, Winstrol daily. Eleven injections a week.
But that's only steroids - you need other drugs to stave off the potential side-effects, which include: hair loss, gynecomastia (build-up of breast tissue due to increased oestrogen, aka gyno; aka bitch tits), testicular atrophy, cranial and prostate swelling, erratic sex drive, liver impairment, haemorrhoids, impotence, cysts, acne, abscesses, renal failure. Hair loss, gyno and testicular atrophy should be considered absolute rather than potential hazards: you simply cannot expect to alter your body's chemical make-up without your body reacting.
My own steroid cycle went as follows: Dianabol (10mg tabs, 3 per day for the first 4 weeks); Testosterone Cypionate (500mg per week, 10 weeks); Equipoise (400mg per week, 10 weeks); Nolvadex (anti-oestrogen drug; 1 to 4 pills daily, depending on week); Proviron (male menopause drug, 25mg daily); HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, which is derived from the urine of pregnant women; used during Post Cycle Therapy to restore natural testosterone levels - 500iu twice weekly, administered with an insulin needle).
Believe it or not, it's a fairly mild cycle. Including diuretics and cutting and hardening agents, professional bodybuilders may have 10-15 substances floating around their system at any given time. Like alcohol or drugs, a body's tolerance builds up over time; top pros need to inject 2,500mg of Testosterone or more, weekly, to receive any effect.
Three days into the cycle, my nipples began to itch: onset of Gynomastia. Dump enough testosterone into your body and your system counters by upping its oestrogen output, which leads to a build-up of breast tissue. After long-term use, it can get so bad that some users require surgical breast reductions. I woke up on the morning of day four and nearly had a heart attack at the sight of myself in the mirror. My nipples were the size of milk bottle tops, stretched smooth as the skin of a balloon. The skin had formed into swollen pouches that looked like the rubberised nipples on a baby's bottle. I appeared to have breasts. Pendulous, malformed breasts.
Or was I just chubby and still out of shape? I didn't know. I gave them a jiggle. I couldn't tell if it was fluid build-up or actual flesh. Could a person grow new flesh overnight? I didn't want tits - it went against the purpose of the exercise. I gobbled twice my daily allotment of anti-oestrogen medication. A week's worth of double Nolvadex doses got the gyno under control. But by then my hair had started falling out.
I have a scalp of unruly, bushman-like red hair. While I've never been keen on the colour and its tendency to coil into ringlets when grown out, there has always been plenty of it. Then one morning I was showering, I looked down at my shampoo-foamed hands, and saw dozens of red strands between my fingers. Soon they were everywhere: on my pillow, between my teeth, falling into the pages of books while I read. I became hyper-aware of the way wind felt through my hair: colder on the top of my skull, where there was less protection. And not just my head: the hairs on my arms and legs, even my testicles, were falling out. Not a single follicle seemed firmly moored to my skin.
Then, one sleepless night (the steroids also triggered insomnia) my testicles shrunk. Testicular atrophy is the most well-known side-effect of steroid abuse. It's an inherent irony: here you are trying to turn yourself into an über-man while part of the most obvious manifestation of your manhood dwindles before your eyes. Female users suffer the opposite reaction: their clitorises become so swollen and hard that, in extreme cases, they resemble a tiny penis.
Basically, you pump so much testosterone into your system that you rob your gonads of purpose, they lie dormant for the duration of your steroid cycle. And while I knew this would happen, the physical sensation was beyond horrible. I felt this rude clenching inside my scrotum, like a pair of tiny hands had grasped the spermatic cords and tightened into fists. It happened that fast - like a door slammed shut. 'No more testosterone!' my gonads cried. 'Closed for business!' I sat up, gasping, clutching my testicles to make sure they were still there. In a few days time they had shrunk to half their normal size: plump ripe grapes.
Another sleepless night, a week later, I felt a ridge on my forehead. Cranial swelling - most often a neanderthal-like ridge forming above the brow - is commonly associated with the steroid HGH, or Human Growth Hormone, originally made from the crushed pituitary glands of fresh cadavers. But cranial swelling assumes many forms: in addition to 'caveman brow', some users find semi-solid lumps forming on their foreheads. Some lumps grow to the size of hard-boiled eggs, at which point they require surgical removal.
The next morning, an inspection in the bathroom: was that a slight swelling across the top of my eyebrows? It seemed impossible - this only happens in extreme cases. My own perceived bulge wasn't altogether solid, sort of mushy, but as I smoothed my fingers across my forehead I had this terrifying sense that my bone structure had been somehow altered.
This was the primary fear I ran up against: were these changes happening, and would they subside once I quit 'roiding, or were they permanent? I could handle rampant hair loss, a caveman head, shrunken testicles, hell, even tits - so long as it was temporary. But what if it wasn't?
My sixth injection goes badly. I've been shooting my gluteus and while it's relatively painless the skin has gone tight and I'm thinking the oil hasn't quite dissolved. I elect to stick it in my thigh instead.
I get the needle in three-quarters of an inch before I hit a major nerve. My leg bucks uncontrollably, knee nearly striking my forehead. It takes a few minutes for the pain to subside. Blood leaks from the puncture wound down my leg. I decide I'm not a fan of thigh injections. So I try my calf. Sitting cross-legged, ankle propped on knee, I push the needle in. It goes in easy enough but when I aspirate the syringe fills with blood: I've hit a vein. I wipe the needle with rubbing alcohol and try another spot: again, blood. I boot the excess onto a paper towel, plug a fresh needle onto the syringe, and try again: more blood. It is coming out of my thigh and now from a triangle of holes in my calf. What, am I all veins?
I end up back at my glutes. But I soon regret it: I feel a perfect bubble of oil the size of a pearl onion an inch under my skin. When I massage it the bubble wobbles under my fingertips, all of one piece. It's still there come night time: in bed, I roll onto my side and feel it pressed against my hipbone, solid as a ball bearing. Like the princess with a pea, I have a hard time sleeping.
To embark on a steroid cycle is to devote yourself to rituals. Wake up, eat, medicate, work out, eat, work out, eat, medicate, sleep. Repeat daily for 16 weeks.
Eating becomes a ritual. To maximise muscle growth you must eat one gram of protein for each pound of your weight per day. But I pushed my target further, to around 1.5g of protein per pound - or 337.5g daily.
Consider that a great source of natural protein - a can of tuna - has 13g of protein. That means I'd have to eat 25 cans a day. The most I ever managed was 20, forking it straight from the can. Please believe me when I tell you it is sheer lunacy to eat 20 cans of tuna. Eventually I settle on six cans a day, supplemented with five to six protein shakes. I go through four 2.4lb tubs of protein powder a week, 158lb in all. I keep shovelling a limited range of foodstuffs - tuna, bananas, egg whites, boiled chicken breasts - into my mouth with the listless motions of an automaton. Thankfully the Equipoise, developed to increase lean body weight appetite in horses, gives my appetite a much-needed boost.
Injections become a ritual. Run the vials under hot water to warm the oil. Unwrap a fresh syringe. Draw 1cc Equipoise, followed by 1.5cc Testosterone. Tap the syringe to release air bubbles, push the plunger until a tiny bead forms at the pin-tip. Swab the injection site with alcohol and inject s-l-o-o-o-w, massaging so the oil soaks in.
It isn't much different from the way a heroin addict goes about things: mix the drugs, prepare the needle, find a clean injection site. I reached a point where the careful steps and resultant anticipation became as heady as the rush itself. Those last few weeks, I couldn't stop shaking as I prepared the needle.
The workout becomes a ritual. If the gym is a temple of the body, I went from casual worshipper to fanatical zealot. I pushed myself and found I possessed limits beyond all reckoning. But I'd push myself past the limit, too - twice I caught the smell of ozone, saw awful stars flitting before my eyes, and came to sprawled on the gym carpet. I'd lift until my arms hung like dead things from my shoulders. I took post-workout naps in the changing room, spread out on a bench, too exhausted to walk home.
The prostate is an organ I associate with old men. Surgical-gloved fingers. Not, in any way, an organ I should be aware of. And yet I was, because the benign little organ had swollen to the point where it felt like a fist-sized balloon pressed against my testicles. This is a fairly common side-effect; some professional bodybuilders get prostatitis to such an extent they require a catheter.
I was urinating 15 times a day. A swollen prostate cramps the urethral tube, making it torture to pee. It also presses against the bladder, making it feel as if you always need to pee, even if there's nothing to pass: I stood over the toilet for five minutes, coaxing, cajoling, only to produce a squirt. My urine took on a disturbingly rich hue, like cask-aged brandy.
I heard that 'vigorous manual relief' helped ease prostate pain. But when I tried this, it felt as though the pipe connecting the sperm factory to its exit had been clothes-pegged: nothing much comes out, and the little that does looks embarrassed to be there.
The key was continual application. I became obsessed with manual relief. Four times a day I was manually relieving myself. All that testosterone in my system, it didn't take much to get the motor humming. I was relieving myself to photos of muscle-bound woman gracing tubs of protein powder. I even relieved myself to a perfume sample in a magazine; I relieved myself to a smell - vigorously so!
Wake up, eat, jerk off, work out, eat, jerk off, eat, work out, eat, jerk off, eat, sleep.
The question most sane readers will be asking by this point is: why didn't he stop? Why, despite all the awful side-effects, did he keep plugging needles into himself?
I'm sure my answer is no different to that given by most steroid users: the results.
Once we pass that period of massive physical change - childhood through our teens, puberty and growth spurts - we settle into a sense of our bodies. We understand the parameters and capabilities, what it can and cannot do. And though it's disheartening to say, at 30, I was already finding evidence of a body on its downslope. While I worked out regularly, I hadn't made a sizeable gain in years. In gym parlance, I'd 'hit the plateau'.
Steroids shattered the limitations of my body. I first sensed their effects while bench-pressing dumbbells. I usually peak at 85lb each, or 170lb total. But after 10 repetitions with the 85s I was stunned: it felt like a warm-up! With a degree of trepidation - we're talking weights that, if mishandled, could break a wrist or some ribs - I picked up the 90-pounders, which I'd never attempted. They went up easily and I ripped out 10 reps. It was an out-of-body sensation: somebody else's arms were pushing those weights, someone else's pectorals flexing and contracting.
I went up to 100lb dumbbells - benching roughly my own body weight. I'd been locked at 160-170lb for two years and now, in the course of a single workout, I'd shot up 30lb.
My workout weights rocketed across the board. I was doing wide-grip chin-ups with a 35lb plate strapped to my waist; shoulder-pressing 75lb dumbbells; slapping 45lb plates on the biceps bar to curl 115lb. I was bottoming out Nautilus machines, lifting their maximum weights. My body exploded, 205lb to 235lb in the space of a few weeks - in 'roider vernacular I'd 'swallowed the air hose'.
I became a huffer, a puffer, a grunter, a screamer. Anyone who frequents gyms has seen those guys who make ungodly noises while throwing huge masses of weight around. I'd always found these displays childish and tended to look away, as I would from a toddler having a tantrum in a supermarket. So imagine my surprise to find myself bellowing, shrieking and groaning. It was like a silverback gorilla's mating ritual: I wanted to be seen lifting, wanted everyone to know I was the biggest, toughest motherfucker in the gym. 'Hoooo-aaahhh!' 'Eeeeeee-yahhh!' Look at me! I'm a big boy!
It was pathetic and I should have known better - actually I did know better, but I didn't let that stop me. The 'pumps' I'd get after a workout clouded all judgment. My glances at the gym mirrors were at first baffled: 'Is that me?' double-takes that soon mutated into looks of preening narcissism. I noticed how light played differently upon my chest and arms, the pockets of blue shadow filling my new contours.
The thing is, I knew it was all fake. I hadn't earned it; it was actually quite freakish. But it's like a woman with giant fake breasts: everyone knows they're fake, but damn it if they don't still draw attention.
That oil I shot into my hip weeks ago had not dissolved. The deep pain convinced me I'd developed an abscess. In effect, I've got a pouch of month-old oil inside my hip, walled off by my immune system. If I'm lucky it's sterile, but if not it is infected, the surrounding tissue gone necrotic.
I decide to drain it myself by injecting an empty needle and drawing out the stale oil. My hope is it's still liquid; if it's congealed and lard-like, I'll need medical attention.
The needle sunk into the pocket of infected tissue. The pain was expected and surprisingly bearable. I drew back the plunger and got only a few drops of clear broth. I disconnected the syringe and left the needle jutting out, applying pressure to the surrounding skin. Blood so dark it was almost black dripped down my thigh. Disgusting and more than a little scary, but the pressure subsided. When I'd squeezed as much out as I could, I filled another syringe with sterile water, attached it to the needle still stuck in my skin, injected it, then unclipped the syringe and squeezed most of the water out.
I figured it was a decent job for an untrained meatball like myself. And it did the trick: a week later I was sleeping on my side again.
Week 12, I peak at 240lb. I've packed on 35lb in less than four months. My body has gone through an extreme thickening process. My pectoral muscles are solid slabs of meat hung off my clavicles. My latissimus dorsi muscles flare out from the midpoint of my back: what bodybuilders call a 'cobra's hood'. My triceps and biceps have swollen so much my T-shirt sleeves bunch up at my shoulders, too narrow to fit over my arms.
But the list of physical ailments is mounting. Chronic back pain has set in. I can't walk more than a few blocks before what feels like a fist-sized stone settles upon my lower back. My flexibility has vanished. There are areas I can not reach due to my new size; if I want to scratch my neck I have to go to the cutlery drawer for a fork.
One night I was watching a legal drama on TV - one of those 'ripped from the headlines' type shows. A morbidly obese man was suing a snack company, whom he held responsible for his obesity. It was revealed that the main ingredient in the snack was high fructose corn syrup, a compound that inhibited the hormone leptin, whose function is to send a signal to the brain that the stomach is full - essentially, leptin tells us when to stop eating. But if this signal is never received, a person will go on eating past the point of reason.
Steroids are like high fructose corn syrup. Essentially, they fool a body into a sense that it is stronger and more resilient than it truly is. You accomplish feats that, in your heart and mind, you know are beyond your capacities - and yet you feel so good, so strong, that you convince yourself otherwise. But afterwards it is impossible to deny the toll these exertions have taken on you. After a workout my joints felt like they were hyper-extended. They popped and cracked, noises like wheel nuts rattling in a cement mixer. I felt calcified, hardened, and frighteningly old.
My cycle ends. I've swallowed every anti-oestrogen pill, injected every cc of Testosterone, Equipoise and HGC. By my best estimate, I've eaten 560 cans of tuna, over $750 worth. $1,280 on protein powder. The steroids themselves cost $600.
One morning I wake up and everything has changed. The first thing I notice upon waking is that I feel... well, good. No sluggishness, only minor joint pain. Genuinely refreshed. Then, on my way to the bathroom, I sense a new weight between my legs - my testicles! Fellas, where have you been? Great to have you back, boyos!
The feeling of elation lasts exactly 10 paces: the distance from my bed to the bathroom mirror. I'm staring at a human boneyard. Where are my pecs? I see two shrivelled bags hanging off my chest. My arms - dear lord, my arms! Shapeless shoestrings dangling from a pair of rotten-apple shoulders. My stomach looks like a deflated clown balloon. My legs belong to a coma victim. I step on the scale: 222lb! I've shed 13lb overnight.
Now I realise only the most deluded of 222lb men can stare into a mirror and see a skeletal horror staring back. But I'd become so used to my new body that I felt like a scarecrow with a tear in its belly, bleeding its stuffing all over a farmer's field. The fact that I'd packed on 12lb of raw muscle over four months, that my testicles were up and running again, that I'd woken up feeling better than I had in months - all of this was erased by what I'd lost.
It got worse once I hit the gym. Chest day, which meant dumbbell bench presses. I didn't even attempt to pick up the 105-pounders, which I'd been maxing out with. I settled on the 90s; if I could lift them, it'd be a 20lb increase over my pre-cycle max.
I could barely get the things off my chest. I struggled through a single rep, arms quaking, and halfway through the second the dumbbells crashed down and I rolled awkwardly off the bench, barking my elbows. I felt like a total fraud. Everyone who'd been watching me the past few months as I heaved massive weight about, bellowing like a steer in rut - all these knowing eyes now saw me as a charlatan.
I'd lost it. Everything I'd gained had been washed away. Popeye without his spinach. Weak and broken and utterly human. All the needles, the gallons of protein I'd chugged, pound after pound of tuna, the urine of pregnant women running through my veins, the fainting spells and sleepless nights, the muscle knots and bitch tits and shrunken gonads and the hair in my food and abscesses and caveman brow - every risk I'd taken, all that sweat and toil for nothing.
I fell into a week-long funk. I cleaned my apartment out: the unopened cans of tuna, the uneaten protein powder - all of it went in the bin. I ordered a large pizza, pepperoni and double cheese. I wolfed it down with gulps of Pepsi. I wanted to get fat and disgusting. I wanted to inflict damage upon myself. The rational part of my mind was going, 'You did the research - you knew this was bound to happen.' But the other part of my mind - the part closer to my body, the part now accustomed to the sly weightroom looks and the more defined, somehow burlier cast of my shadow, the part that relished how people ceded plenty of room as they passed me on the city's narrow pavements - that part of me was not to be consoled.
I headed to the doctor's. Though I felt much better now that it was over, I was still suffering aches and pains. The results: a partially herniated disc in my lower spine, the result of either bad posture or an accumulation of pressure due to excess body weight. A chiropractic visit was scheduled. An enlarged prostate. I was prescribed Avodart, which worked wonders.Fluid build-up on left knee - again, the result of excess weight. The doctor told me he'd get back to me with the blood test results.
I started out weighing 205lb and ended up at 208. My body looks no better now - if anything, it's worse. Bloated somehow, like I'd died, my body abandoned in a gassy swamp. The gyno has left nipple-nubbins that poke out when I wear anything tighter than a golf shirt.
Has it been worth it? The question presupposes that I expected to benefit from the experience. I embarked on the steroid cycle in order to bring a level of real-world verisimilitude to my novel. I wanted to feel what my character felt, experience a portion of his life, write with conviction about what he went through.
In a way, I am ashamed of myself. Was it worth it - all for a book? What have I done to myself in the long run? Jeopardised my chances of having a child, perhaps. I worry about that a lot. More than anything else.
Has it been worth it? Somewhere along the line I'd been let off the hook. My grandfather, father, uncles, men of generations past - they didn't get the free pass I did. Their lives were about poverty, warts, factory floors, untilled fields. They endured. What have I ever had to endure? I felt unworthy of all I'd been so carelessly given. And I loathed myself for taking it.
I currently weigh 170lb. The blood tests showed my liver values were totally out of whack. As I had never been able to convince a woman that I was a viable prospect to make a baby with before, I'll never know if an inability to conceive, should that be the case, is attributable to steroids or the innate decrepitude of my seed.
Did I take steroids to write a book, or did I write a book as an excuse to take steroids? Often, all you want is to step off the path you've carved. And when my body began to fall apart, when the drugs began to destroy me, I persisted in the belief that all suffering on my part was long overdue. I would endure. The eventual understanding that a certain nobility underlay my grandfather's suffering, whereas mine was not much more than a masochistic stubbornness - I'd like to think that stopped me. And when I'd stared at myself, naked and porcine, in the bathroom mirror, I told myself that if nothing else, I had suffered. I'm ashamed to admit, I took pride in that too.
'Mr Davidson,' the doctor asked over the phone, 'are you on any herbal medications or' - a pause - 'bodybuilding supplements?'
'I was on creatine,' I told him, creatine being a legal bodybuilding supplement.
'Mr Davidson.' Another pause, followed by a heavy exhale. 'Never, ever take creatine again.'
The doctor hung up on me.
· The Fighter by Craig Davidson is published by Picador on 6 June.