Ashes of the Amazon by Milton Hatoum
Posted on 23,Dec 2009 in Reviews

Ashes of the Amazon
by Milton Hatoum
Bloomsbury,
Paperback; 274 pages,
ISBN 9780747596721
Price £8.99
translated from the Portuguese by John Gledson
Dan Eltringham
Set in Manaus, capital of Brazil’s Amazona region, Ashes of the Amazon evokes place and milieu far removed from the contextual touchstones of European literary fiction, while being at once predominantly concerned with one of the European novel’s great themes: the value of art, the worth of being an artist, and the thorny problem of whether an artistic life is one insulated from other kinds of social responsibility.
The novel’s main strength is its very serious engagement with the relation of art to poverty, the myth of the impoverished artist and to commerce. This is familiar ground, but it is well covered, and although the novel as a piece of art will usually end up taking art’s side, here it is far from unequivocal. This is largely due to Hatoum’s impressive ability to construct what appear to be stereotypes and then complicate them.  This tension between type and textured complexity is most evident in the characters of Jano and Mundo, father and son, current owner and intended inheritor, respectively, of the family’s Jute exportation [...]

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 “Don’t we breathe through what we speak? Don’t story-telling and singing blot out our pain?”
The Amazon River and rainforest have captivated, provoked, even frightened, since the earliest times of human habitation. In Orphans of Eldorado, Milton Hatoum evokes the legend of The Enchanted City – a shining city of gold at the bottom of the Amazon River where people live as enchanted beings.
The story is set in Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s Amazona region. Here Amando Cordovil runs a shipping empire with the help of his trusty lawyer Estiliano.  Arminto Cordovil, Amando’s son and the narrator of the story, is somewhat estranged from his father. One day he receives notification that his father would like to see him and the two agree to meet.
But before they can do so Amando dies suddenly and Arminto inherits a fortune. He, however, becomes obsessed by Dinaura, a woman who lives with nuns. His passion for her blinds him to the slow decay of his shipping empire and when the Eldorado – a boat with much of his cargo onboard – sinks, he is left with nothing.
And Dinaura disappears. According to the whispers around the town, she has been taken to The Enchanted City, [...]

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MILTON HATOUM: The Flowering of Memory in “Eve’s Verandas”
When Milton Hatoum (b. Manaus, 1952) came onto the international literary scene in 1989 with his first novel, Relato de um certo Oriente [Tree of the Seventh Heaven, 1994/Tale of a Certain Orient, 2004], he was already a mature author with a complex narrative style, whose subject related to his own family background of Lebanese immigrants who settled in one of Brazil’s most fascinating regions, the Amazon, and specifically in its capital city of Manaus.  Hatoum is interested in literature and history, as filtered through memory and imagination, and he writes in non-linear accounts of the transition from the Middle East to the Amazon using modern narrative techniques of distancing. In recovering a world frozen in time through the opaque and often melancholic memories of his characters, Hatoum’s Manaus is reminiscent of Lawrence Durell’s Alexandria, a city recaptured in a quartet of novels (1957-1960), each retelling the story and judging the city from the perspective of a particular character. The difference here is that Hatoum’s characters are immigrants who are acculturating to a strange new world, where space has a special ability to change their lives, and all the characters are concentrated [...]

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This text published at Global Short Story Project in Another Magazine’s Document and in a pullout section of Moleskine 2010. 
Eight writers, four continents, two hemispheres, one moment in time: for this issue of Document, loosely based around the theme of travel, we invited some of the most interesting writers at work today, positioned all over the world, to write about what they could see from their desks, at exactly the same time: 12 noon GMT, November 27. A snapshot, a feeling of renewed optimism, a sense of something coming together just for an instant, a group of disparate people working together; welcome to a shared point of view…
Milton Hatoum
between São Paulo and Manaus, Brazil
Latitude: 23˚31’, south. Longitude: 46˚ 31’, west.
10am, November 27, 2008
30 metres up, in an apartment on São Paulo’s west side, I see a grey or blue sky over the greatest metropolis of South America. Thousands of road vehicles travel the river Pinheiros’s embankments every hour, but at this moment, midday, there is an unending queue of stationary cars and lorries. Beside the river, on the University of São Paulo’s vast campus, I see the clock tower, and further on, the beautiful, miniature building of the Architecture and Urban [...]

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translated by John Gledson
http://www.miltonhatoum.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/The-Island-City_Milton-Hatoum_excerpt.pdf

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http://www.miltonhatoum.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Island-City_Hatoum_release.pdf
Read excerpts here: http://www.miltonhatoum.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/The-Island-City_Milton-Hatoum_excerpt.pdf

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Somewhere upriver in the deep Amazon rainforest is the Vila Amazonia, a grand old estate-house with a busy jute plantation, property of the tycoon Trajano Mattoso.
http://www.miltonhatoum.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/TheIndependent_5Dec2008.jpg

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Sibling rivalry is as old as the world. From Cain and Abel to the Karamazovs, every man seems to revel in the desire of being the chosen child. Jews and Muslims still quarrel about which brother was to be sacrificed by Abraham – Isaac or Ishmael – because even when led to the slaughter a brother’s cry is a pathetic “choose me!”

Sibling rivalry is as old as the world. From Cain and Abel to the Karamazovs, every man seems to revel in the desire of being the chosen child. Jews and Muslims still quarrel about which brother was to be sacrificed by Abraham – Isaac or Ishmael – because even when led to the slaughter a brother’s cry is a pathetic “choose me!”

The brothers in Milton Hatoum’s novel are twins, pride of an immigrant family in Manaus, in the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil. The father is a Lebanese adventurer, Halim, who falls in love with Zana, the beautiful daughter of a restaurant owner from Lebanon. After the old man dies, Zana, unable to bear the grief of his memory, convinces her husband to open a small shop.
 Zana wants children; Halim wants Zana to himself alone. When twins are born, it [...]

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Almost from its foundations, the Amazonian port of Manausbecame one of those places which has as lively a reality form armchair travellers as for those who have actually managed to make the journey. (…)
http://www.miltonhatoum.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/TLS_May24_2002.jpg

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 Memory is a well-established theme inm contemporary Latin American fiction, and perhaps the primary obsession of its finests exponents. From Rayuela by Julio Cortázar, to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, to The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, the reconstruction of the past is a duty forced on those who have reason to question their individual and collective identities and doubt the vearcity of the histories passed to them by others. But a more Proustian motive underlies Milton Hatoum´s exploration of memory in this story of a childhood spent in the Amazoninan port of Manaus.
http://www.miltonhatoum.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Site_pasta_Tale_TLS_July23_2004.jpg
translated by John Gledson

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