Ah, Gabriela, scent and color, a beautiful young woman, almost still a girl, who arrived in the city with a rag-tag band of starving, dirty immigrantsAh, Gabriela, scent and color, a beautiful young woman, almost still a girl, who arrived in the city with a rag-tag band of starving, dirty immigrants from the backlands of northeastern Brazil in the 1920s.
(I added a funny TBR story about this book at the end.)
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Although he’s not in the title, much of the story also follows Nacib, a Syrian Brazilian, whom you can call Arab, but don’t ever call him Turk. He needs a cook for his restaurant. It’s the only restaurant in town that isn’t also a brothel. He hires Gabriela and the romance begins. Maybe he’ll even marry her, but one of the themes in this book is “Wildflowers don’t belong in vases.”
The novel overall is an epic James Michener-type story about the real city of Ilheus, the author’s hometown, and how it grew in its time as the major cocoa-growing region of Brazil. (And it still is.) But all the action is in the present; we get the historical background through narrative and discussion among the characters. Many of the important characters are wealthy ‘colonels’ who won control of cocoa lands through wild-west gun battles between rival cowboy gangs.
This is Brazil in the 1920s so “The Doctor was not a doctor and the Captain was not a captain. Just as most of the colonels were not colonels: the title was merely a traditional symbol of ownership of a large plantation…they were ‘colonels of the most irregulars,’ for many of them had led bands of outlaws for the bloody struggle for control of the land.” The priest is a real priest, but his unmarried housekeeper may be a bit more than that because she miraculously keeps having children.
A young, wealthy man from Rio de Janeiro comes to town. He has big ideas about improving the town. He personally pays to build a public boardwalk on the beach. He helps start a bus company. He wants to dredge the harbor to improve navigation. I guess we can call him a Progressive. (Or a ‘Young Turk,’ but that may no longer be politically correct?). The stage is set for a political battle and maybe even violence because the old reactionary colonels don’t want change and they want to maintain their behind-the-scenes control of everything.
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Women’s lib is nowhere to be found in Brazil in the 1920s. Maybe there’s an inkling of it in one young woman who wants to get an education and doesn’t want to be forced to marry someone chosen by her father. (view spoiler)[ Her father beats her with his horsewhip. (hide spoiler)] But the double standard is supreme – and extreme. If you are a wealthy colonel your wife has a comfortable life with her children and her servants back at the plantation. You keep your mistress in a house in town. You don’t have to worry about your wife finding out because she and everyone else in town knows this.
If your mistress is unfaithful, you dump her and throw her stuff out on the street. Let her go off with her new lover – she’s just a mistress. If your wife is unfaithful, you kill her and her lover. Period. No jury will ever convict you. If you get a good lawyer you probably won’t even be charged with anything. What’s the point? Even the women agree: his wife was unfaithful – what else could he do?
Do these rules apply to Wildflowers? There’s a Pygmalion theme to this novel. Can you take a wildflower, a young woman who has never worn shoes and doesn’t know her last name, or even have one, and turn her into a fine lady?
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I enjoyed the book and the writing. Much of this is satire and tongue-in-cheek. I liked this when someone is visiting one of the old colonels: “His hands shook slightly, his shoulders were bowed, his step was unsteady. " 'You look stronger than ever,’ said Antonio.”
It’s an old Brazilian classic, but not that far back – published in Brazil in 1958. The author was not only progressive but he was elected to Brazil’s parliamentary body as a Communist. Of course, like almost all other well-known Latin American authors of the time, Amado (1912-2001) had to go into exile when military dictators took over.
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Some of his work was not well-received in Brazil. Wiki tells “His depiction of the sexual customs of his land was scandalous to much of 1950s Brazilian society and for several years Amado could not even enter Ilhéus [his home town], where Gabriela was set, due to threats received for the alleged offense to the morality of the city's women.” Amado is best known in English translation for his novel Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.
Here's a TBR story for you. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Brazilian authors including two others by Amado: Home is the Sailor and Shepherds of the Night. A copy of Gabriela had been staring at me from my TBR shelf for 50 years – since college. It survived book cullings from Massachusetts to Virginia to Ohio to Florida. Just never got to it. Then about a month before I wrote this review my older sister was clearing out stuff and, knowing my interest in translations, she sent me her copy of Gabriela. She had received the book as a prize 60 years ago for being the ‘best Portuguese language student’ at our local high school where many students took Portuguese as their foreign language. It has an inscription of congratulations from the Brazilian ambassador at that time – 1963. (It was published in English in 1962, so it was brand new then.) I gave away my old copy and I read and I am keeping her copy!
Top photo of Sonia Braga as Gabriela from the 1975 Brazilian telenovela based on the book. There was also another telenovela series made in 2012. From Wikipedia. Modern-day Ilheus from alamy.com Map showing Ilheus from pinterest.com The author on a Brazilian stamp from ebay.com
