SAVING THE FIRE: A Novel, multiple prize-winner ITAMAR VIEIRA JUNIOR's follow-up to Crooked Plow

SAVING THE FIRE: A Novel (Trilogia da Terra #2)
ITAMAR VIEIRA JUNIOR (tr. Johnny Lorenz)
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The highly anticipated sequel to the Booker-shortlisted international sensation, Crooked Plow

Moisés lives with his father, Mundinho, and his sister, Luzia, in Tapera do Paraguaçu, a rural village in Bahia. His other siblings have left, and their mother vanished. Tapera, what remains of it, is a community of farmers, fishermen, and potters of Afro-Indigenous origin, overlooked from on high by a forbidding seventeenth century monastery, from which the church still rules over all they survey. With their mother long vanished, Luzia provides what she can by way of care and affection for her brother, but the long hours she works at the monastery, and the whispers about her strange powers, limit her capacity and she dreams of a family reunited and of liberty, of freedom from decades of suffering and decades of secrets.

Epic and lyrical, with the power to both enchant and outrage the reader, Saving the Fire shows us that the ghosts of a family's past are often indistinguishable from the shadows of a nation. Masterfully, Itamar Vieira Junior blends the intimate journeys of his characters with faithfully rendered elements of Brazilian life. It's a story permeated by the spectre of colonialism, the scars of which still show, and still ache.

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

My Review: Book two of a trilogy started by Author Vieira in Crooked Plow (link is to the Foreword Reviews review, as I have not read the book)...shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize...this story won the 2024 Jabuti Award for Best Novel (his second win, after 2020's for Crooked Plow). The name might not mean much to Anglophones, but the "tortoise" award is most of a century old and quite prestigious in Brazil. Jorge Amado won the inaugural award in 1959 (first of several); Clarice Lispector in 1978; João Gilberto Noll first in 1994; serious, heavy-hitting writers who deserve more renown in the US on literary merit, as well as on the principle that understanding other cultures is best begun by reading their favorite stories.

Continuing his exploration of rural Bahia, Author Itamar creates the village of Tapera do Paraguaçu to play out this polyphonic novel. An Afro-Indigenous family, broken and hag-ridden by tenacious, toxic African-religion superstitions, the Catholic Church's dominance in the community...and the very common trauma of sexual assault from Catholic priests...all stacking atop political and social marginalization plus dispossesion from the land that feeds them. The state of Bahia is a very old colonizer locus, thus the heavy influence of African-tradition religious activity as morphed by centuries of Catholic persecution. It's an old church technique, branding indigenous religion's flaws and faults as superstitions while hiding (in Brazil's case) behind absolute civil immunity for criminal acts. Of which there are plenty in this story.

Moisés da Silva, our primary PoV character for the first chapter, and his sisters are struggling along with everyone else jusy to find enough to eat. He chooses the common path of running away to the city in order to reduce the famiy's load; his sister Luzia (narrating the second chapter) remains, garnering a reputation as a witch because she's visibly disabled. She's working a paying job in the local monastery's laundry, which puts her in harm's way across several axes. All the other siblings, in common with the rest of the community, scramble to make the family's ends meet. Maria, the only other da Silva sibling we spend significant time with, had an "easy" path of marriage, taking her away from the family in the third chapter. Marriage is not ever an escape!

It has the intended effect of poverty. People who struggle to stay fed are less likely to foment rebellion, that's the behavior of those who can no longer even do that much. It's also a means of preventing families from developing the kind of intimacy that comes from being able to articulate your pain to each other, discovering how similar in effect you are to those around you. The opening scene throws you in medias res into the desparate and painful this life we're vicariously sharing truly is. People driven to these extremes aren't able, never having been taught how, to communicate and share their pain.

It is a lake of fire. It is life lived while the fire consumes you...living next to the living entity of the River Paraguaçu, unquenched in their burning, desperate in their thirst, locked away without the burning walls ever collapsing enough to set them free just ablaze. Wait...there are over four stars up there...what the what? It's dark and sad and terrible!

It's true and powerful and, in its survivors' acts of self-empowerment from the first pages onward, deeply inspiring. Humans gutting it out, battling injustice, refusing to be deprived forever...a modern take on The Grapes of Wrath, Brazilianized. In the story's structure the fourth and last chapter melds all three previous points of view, brings all the toughest troubles tohgether, provides the da Silva faily a jumping off point into the always-uncertain thing we call the future:

Time passes, but we don’t exhaust the world of its mysteries, and when we unveil the truth, we unveil just a part.