THERE'S NO POINT IN DYING, words that (now) chill me

THERE'S NO POINT IN DYING
FRANCISCO MACIEL (tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, preorder now for delivery 13 January 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this kaleidoscopic novel set in a favela of Rio de Janeiro—“in the city of stray bullets, in the land of lost opportunities”—a gang member runs wildly through the streets not knowing he has only seven minutes left to live. Barflies, prostitutes, immigrants, a gay couple, a taxi driver, cops, a mobster, and more populate Francisco Maciel’s first book to appear in English.

Leaping back and forth across time and spiraling into the surreal, the novel coalesces around a brutal massacre. Maciel’s multiracial characters write poetry and discourse on soccer, insects, samba, and climate change.

Gritty, unpredictable, and percussive, There’s No Point in Dying is translated by National Book Award winner Bruna Dantas Lobato.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: So once Dafé dies in the first pages of this raucous story-braid, we meet Guile Xangô (a philosophe who's out of place among the pimps and criminals in the favela, and his condescending companion in curmudgeonry and friend Vovô do Crime, as they bounce among times and between people in their geographic orbit. They leave contrails of wry judgment and mean-spirited character assassination. They're flâneurs of the favela, wandering hither thither and yon, taking it all in, standing apart from it, never more than ankle-deep in the roiling waters of undeclared wars, pitched battles between different kinds of criminal gangs.

It sounds violent because it is, because life at street level always is unless you're standing on mountains of privilege. Vovô and Guile aren't, yet they're held apart by the general consensus on the street that they're different, apart by nature, not targets...it's their role to bear witness. Like all us outsiders, weirdos, marginal people.

The ghost stories, animal fables, violent assaults avenged, and socially frowned on intimacies snatched in the chaos of Life, aren't strung on a novel's plot. They're fragments of reality, shards of fracturing order. They're not in linear, but emotional, order. The tone of these pieces of story is consistently manic. A lot happens, just like in life.

It's quite fun if you're in the right frame of mind. The world, the sensory world, is evoked well. It's sights and sounds don't obtrude, they weave in and out of the foreground to good effect. The reason I'm not offering a fifth star on this one is that it's less a narrative than vignettes; it's not a flaw, it's a design decision, and it carries costs with its benefits. The author is able to set a tremendously propulsive pace, at the expense of the emotional investment in the characters. This is not to say they're mere labels moving through a complicated storyboard like something from the Marvel Comics Universe. It's not a narrative to linger, though.

It's a terrific tale of fracturing lives in tension and under pressure. If you're after that sensation of "wow! what happened then?" without lingering on the consequences, this is your read.