Via Ápia
A Novel
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From one of Brazil’s most acclaimed new literary stars, a twenty-first-century epic set in Rio’s largest favela.
Life on the morro, the hill, is good. Five young people—the brothers Washington and Wesley and their friends Douglas, Murilo, and Biel—live close to Rocinha’s main avenue, Via Ápia, just a quick bus ride from the beaches of Rio de Janeiro.
But the rhythms of their lives stutter and scratch when Brazil’s militarized police storm Rocinha as part of “pacification” efforts ahead of the upcoming World Cup and an influx of international tourists. Via Ápia charts the expectant anxiousness before the police’s invasion, the chaos born from their occupation of the hill, and the aftermath of their silent withdrawal from the favela after one year.
Told in heated bursts and marked by the charged chronology of the protagonists’ lives, Geovani Martins’s prodigious debut novel knits together the dramas and dreams of the favela during a peak of turbulent unrest. Like the boom boom kat of Brazilian funk, the unbridled ambitions and resolute friendships of these characters blare throughout Via Ápia, delivering a resonant counternarrative to the notion that violent interventions are the state’s only remedy to the afflictions of crime and poverty. The favela retorts: life, life is the answer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The tense debut novel from Martins (after the story collection The Sun on My Head) follows a group of friends in Rocinha, the largest of Rio's favelas, during a government crackdown in the months prior to the 2012 World Cup. At the height of the summer, Washington works tirelessly at a restaurant alongside his brother Wesley, whose dependency on cocaine spirals out of control. An intersecting narrative follows Murilo, a fellow favela resident and soldier for the military police, who has a vivid nightmare in which he slaughters his friend and roommate Douglas during a raid. After Murilo and Douglas lose their apartment due to their other roommate Biel's erratic drug-fueled behavior, the trio find a place next door to the brothers, who encourage Douglas to follow his dream of becoming a tattoo artist. By November, the military police occupy Rocinha under the guise of the drug war. Biel, wishing he had some weed, is tormented by the roar of helicopters, while Murilo increasingly questions his role in the state-sponsored violence. Martins's plainspoken prose takes an honest look at how drugs provide relief from boredom and oppression while offering an unsparing view into the dangers of addiction. Readers will have a tough time putting this one down.
