Harmada
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Like an Edenic Adam born from the clay, the narrator of Harmada rises to his feet from humble, stinking mud. By the novel’s end he’ll found Harmada, the capital city of a country left unnamed. How did this happen? How did he end up there? Told using Noll’s characteristic fragmented logic and spirited prose, Harmada traces the life of this unnamed man on his journey from forest-dweller to well-to-do statesman, from asylum patient to Actor to Father to God, conjuring along the way essential questions about the power of art, the vanity of glory, and the meaning of life.
A mythic tale of art and displacement, Harmada serves as yet another reminder of Noll’s sublime literary power. Often considered to be his masterpiece, Harmada is the winner of Jabuti Prize for Best Novel and was named one of Bravo! Magazines top 100 Brazilian novels of all time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The late Brazilian novelist Noll (1946 2017) returns with the provocative and outlandish story of a washed-up actor drifting through the fantastical city of Harmada. Propelled through protean events and bizarre sexual phantasmagoria, the narrator sometimes appears as surprised by the book's twists and turns as the reader. He swims with a disabled man who vanishes into the river, almost has a foursome in a dilapidated hotel room, survives a devastating earthquake, marries and discovers he is infertile, lives in a derelict shelter for years, and eventually becomes a successful theater director much of which occurs in a matter of pages or even paragraphs. The book flows with the logic of dreams, the scenes altering as suddenly and inscrutably as the narrator's explosive urges. Bodily fluids abound, acting as a sort of governing metaphor for the book itself: "the narrative was a fluid I emitted thinly, toward a world still unknown." The narrator wanders through notions of religion and poverty, storytelling and memory, as he tries to make sense of life in a "world still unknown." The plot meanders so unpredictably that it leaves readers bewildered but never disinterested. But, as this is a portrait of a man's alienation amid a search for joy, its disorientation might just be the point.
