The award-winning Brazilian novelist Adriana Lisboa has written seven well-received novels alongside short stories, essays, poetry, and books for children in her native Portuguese.
Widely translated, she has become one of her country’s best-known writers. She was once named one of the most important writers in Latin America by the highly respected Hay Festival/Bogota World Book Capital. She is also a translator of literature herself.
A former musician, Lisboa once made a living singing Brazilian music in France and has also been a writer in residence at the University of California in Berkeley as well as a visiting scholar at the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies in Kyoto
Al Majalla spoke with her about her work across her 25-year literary career. This is the conversation that followed.
In your novel Symphony in White, you tell the story of an unspoken bond between two sisters living under military dictatorship in Brazil. Tell me more about it.
My intention was to establish a parallel between the terrible secrets of violence in a common, middle-class family in a rural area of Brazil and the unspeakable violence that was being perpetrated by the military dictatorship.
But that idea first came to me from the fact I had recently become a mother. My son Gabriel was born in 1998, and I wrote Symphony in White between 1998 and 2000.
I was acutely aware, in a way I had never been before, of our responsibilities when it comes to raising our children and protecting them from a world that can be hostile in so many ways. The novel also wants to discover the redeeming power of love, friendship, and art.
BOOK CLUB 14 February : Our next session of the Brazilian Bilingual Book Club will discuss 'Symphony in White' (Sinfonia em Branco) by Adriana Lisboa. For further information, please visit https://t.co/A9ZinedIbe#Brazil #bookclub #literature #London pic.twitter.com/KLynQVNJek
— Brazil Embassy UK (@BrazilEmbassyUK) February 6, 2019
José Saramago is your favourite writer, and the first award you won was named after him. How did you feel about winning a prize set up to honour someone who you looked up to?
It was actually a shock at first, to be honest. I was quite young, 33 years old, and that was my second novel, so I was still tentatively trying to find my own voice.
Saramago was one of my literary heroes, and when my publisher called me to tell me I had won the prize, I really thought it was a prank.
It was a true honour to receive that award from Saramago’s hands, not just because he was – and still is – the only author writing in Portuguese to receive the Nobel Prize, but also because he truly was a man of admirable ethical standards, apart from being a great wordsmith.
As a Brazilian writer, what do you think of Paulo Coelho's literature?
Paulo Coelho first worked as a songwriter in the 1960s and composed lyrics for important Brazilian artists such as Raul Seixas. His career as a novelist only began two decades later.
He’s by far Brazil’s most well-known and translated author, of course, and has a legion of faithful fans. I have to say I’m not one of them. It’s a kind of literature that is more commercial than what I tend to admire. I like many of the lyrics he wrote in the '60s, though.
