The Sun on My Head
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- €12.99
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- €12.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FIRST BOOK AWARD
The Sun on My Head is a collection of thirteen stories set in Rio's largest favela, gravitating around the lives of young boys and men who, in spite of having to deal with the anguish and difficulties inherent to their age, also struggle with the violence involved in growing up on the less favoured side of the 'Broken City'.
They smoke weed, sell weed, and notice the smell of weed lingering on the clothes of passersby in the streets. A boy steals his security-guard father's gun to show it to his friends, another runs into trouble disposing of a body, and another relapses into an old graffiti habit, with tragic consequences . Drugs and poverty colour them, but these stories also depict the pain of growing up with attendant hopes and desires.
Geovani Martins has produced a spellbinding debut about masculinity, corruption, guilt, poverty and resilience. Completely of our time and yet profoundly timeless, it's a book that animates and humanises the people of a city whose humanity is often obscured by its own reputation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Young men contend with the violence and corruption of Rio de Janerio in this tantalizing debut from Brazilian Martins. The characters in these stories represent a full spectrum of favela life, from the aspiring graffiti artist, Fernando, who longs to give his son a better childhood than his father offered him ("The Tag") to the drug pusher forced to dispose of the body of a customer he kills in a fit of pique ("The Crossing"). In "Spiral," a student who commutes to a tony neighborhood becomes obsessed with its residents, "who inhabited a world unknown to me"; he stalks one for months before he sees in his subject's "eyes the horror of realization." Martins's characters and the situations they navigate grab the reader's attention, but he often shies away from offering a resolution. "TGIF" defies this tendency, accompanying its protagonist on a harrowing subway ride to score drugs in a distant favela and ending in a confrontation with a crooked cop. In Martins's Rio, every interaction is a negotiation, and everyone is "in the same boat: hard up, dopeless, wanting to chill beachside." This is a promising work from an intriguing new voice.
