Macunaíma

Starred review from February 13, 2023
Dodson, a PEN Award–winning translator of Clarice Lispector, breathes new life into this spirited modernist classic from Brazillian writer de Andrade (1893–1945), whose other translated works include Hallucinated City. A frequent refrain—“Ants aplenty and nobody’s healthy, so go the ills of Brazil!”—captures only a hint of the 1928 novel’s frenetic energy and satirizing humor. Over the course of hundreds of years, Macunaíma, a young man with ever-changing characteristics, travels with his brothers Jigue and Maanape from their homeland in the wild north of Brazil to the heart of São Paulo and back. Their mission is to retrieve a magical amulet, muiraquitã, from cannibal giant Venceslau Pietro Pietra. Along the way, de Andrade incorporates Indigenous Tupi and Pemon folklore, a West African Candomble religious ritual that allows people to communicate with deities, formal correspondence, popular vernacular, and continent-spanning botany. Macunaíma derives from an Indigenous Carib and Arawak shape-shifting trickster god, and de Andrade uses him as a blank canvas to explore Brazil’s mass of contradictions; he is at various times Black, white, and Indigenous; wild and urbane; comically officious and boorishly crude, and morally inconsistent. In other words, according to de Andrade, “quintessentially Brazilian.” Electrifying and perplexing, this cornerstone of Brazilian literature shouldn’t be missed.

Starred review from May 1, 2023

Preeminent Brazilian modernist Andrade's audacious 1928 saga gets a brilliant new translation from Dodson. Andrade's narrative follows the protean exploits, sexual and otherwise, of Macuna�ma, an outrageous shapeshifting trickster. Macuna�ma's antiheroic catchphrase "Ah! just so lazy...!" is belied by the magnitude of his misadventures, a rollicking rush of trickery, transformation, and offhand cosmological creation. In a decided improvement over the prior translation's Britishisms, Dodson renders Andrade's Brazilian Portuguese in a slangy, folksy American diction that captures the story's orality. Andrade's omnivorous, polyglot style is liberally seasoned with Indigenous terms, snatches of song, nonce words, and nonsense, combined in a vigorous and often incantatory mode. This is offset by parodies of European elaboration, such as breasts that "do indeed serve in numerous and arduous labours of excellent virtue and prodigious excitation." It's a huge amount of fun. Dodson's smartly curated endnotes gloss a selection of unfamiliar terms and references, without the distraction of footnotes or scholarly paraphernalia. VERDICT It's been said that Macuna�ma put the magic in magical realism. Whatever its progeny may be, Andrade's weird and wondrous tour de force is that rarity: a truly original masterpiece, and one deserving a place in any library of world literature.

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