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arirang's review
4.0
What I knew was that I was here in England, in its capital, having been called upon by an Englishman who seems to need my services badly enough that without them his own endeavours could not progress. This I would never forget, because I still had the hope that if I carefully guarded the nucleus around which my story formed at that moment, I might one day recover the memory of what sustained that nucleus, its entanglements and consequences, it’s rhymes even.
The award-winning Brazilian author João Gilberto Noll, five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, spent time around the turn of the millennium as a visiting scholar in UCL, Berkeley in the US, Bellagio in Italy and at the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture & Society at King's College London, as a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation.
He turned his experiences into two novels - this Lorde (2004) and an earlier 2002 work [b:Berkeley em Bellagio|18812941|Berkeley em Bellagio|João Gilberto Noll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1404396289s/18812941.jpg|26748826] - albeit ones with a entirely not-literal treatment of thos experiences. See https://www.academia.edu/9490485/A_Long_Journey_Home_Local_Meets_Global_in_Jo%C3%A3o_Gilberto_Nolls_Berkeley_em_Bellagio for a discussion of both works and particularly the earlier novel.
Lorde has been translated into English, as Lord, by Edgar Garbelotto and published by the consistently excellent Two Lines Press.
Set in London, the novel's epigraph is taken from Iain Sinclair's [b:London Orbital|118186|London Orbital|Iain Sinclair|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328032557s/118186.jpg|113766], based on a walk around the M25:
The secret interiors of these post-human fortresses solicit conspiracy, acts of sexual transgression. Illicit exchanges between dealers.
That post-human fortresses are, in fact, multistory carparks in Watford, and the words inspired by JG Ballard and his novels [b:Crash|70241|Crash|J.G. Ballard|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1281416649s/70241.jpg|68058] and[b:The Atrocity Exhibition|70240|The Atrocity Exhibition|J.G. Ballard|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386923654s/70240.jpg|68057], gives a sense of the surreal nature of Lord.
The novel itself opens with our narrator, a Brazilian who wrote books that were mostly well received by critics but not the public, arriving at Heathrow from Porto Alegre in Brazil, rather disorientated, his trip a result of an invitation from a rather shadow Englishman, his purposes rather unclear.
The narrator is taken by his English sponsor to Hackney - That distant neighborhood in the north of London, full of Vietnamese and Turkish immigrants, outside of what the travel brochures usually showed on the city maps where he is installed in a flat above one of the many Vietnamese restaurants on Mare Street:
(as an interesting aside, Mare Street is also now home to a Brazilian centre, opened since 2004. Whether that is a coincidence, if the reason the author was familiar with the area was that there was, in reality although unmentioned in the novel, already a Brazilian community there, or indeed if somehow the novel itself has attracted a Brazilian community to the area, I can't say)
His initial journey there from central London was on the 55 bus - and for a long while, his travels centre on that bus route, particularly Hackney, the Oxford Circus terminus of the line, and the Bloomsbury area through which it passes, and where he can walk to from those bus stops:
It was a long walk to Oxford Street, where the 55 came and went, but I didn’t know any other means of transportation, other routes. When I’d gotten down to Oxford (sic) I could walk to countless places in the city, no matter how far they were.
Even after a diversion to London Bridge at Borough Market he walks to Oxford Circus and takes the bus back, a journey that makes little logical sense as this bus route map shows:
In some respects, Lord belongs to a series of excellent novel dealing with the disorientation of an artist finding himself in a strange (at least to them) city - the linguist in Ferenc Karinthy's [b:Metropole|3349113|Metropole|Ferenc Karinthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1354902533s/3349113.jpg|3387521], the musician in Kazuo Ishiguro's masterpiece [b:The Unconsoled|40117|The Unconsoled|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1342193138s/40117.jpg|6372970] and, perhaps most apposite, the writer in [b:Budapest|59528|Budapest|Chico Buarque|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386921754s/59528.jpg|429260] by Chico Buarque, a fellow Brazilian writer and a novel written around the same time. This paper compares Budapest and Lord and sets them in context: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=spanish_pubs
But in Gilberto Noll's work, the strangeness is more around the mental disintegration of his narrator. After the Englishman comes to visit him he immediately rushes him to a hospital in Bloomsbury for treatment (for what is unclear, and perhaps hints that some of the narrator's adventures may have been imagined while, in reality, he was sick in bed). And at the hospital he literally splits in two - part of him remains there
At reception I filled out a form. We entered a ward. The Englishman seemed to be on the staff, so at ease was he inside the hospital. He asked me to sit on an unoccupied bed. I sat. Until the person who seemed to be the doctor arrived. He started to examine me. “It is,” he said with a certain harshness. And he asked me to lie down. He called a nurse. She passed some instruments to him. And the doctor inserted a needle in my vein. I don’t remember ever having felt such satisfaction in my whole life. Not because the medication being introduced had a numbing effect that left me out of it. In the following hours I wouldn’t need to do anything to attribute continuity to things. And was, what’s more, without any fear of my destiny from here on, which would be the normal response in a patient about to undergo a medical procedure in any hospital ward. I just didn’t believe that anything worse could happen, that’s all! I trusted the opposite would be true: that during that whole stay in the hospital the man who was starting to throb inside me and who I still didn’t really know would have a better chance to surface. That when I woke from the anaesthetic I would start to live with another hypothesis about myself and that I would work on it in secret, so that not even my own English friend would be able to notice any change in my character or on the surface of my body. They had kept me there for a reason that I didn’t know. I would use it to be born.
I died for the time I was sedated. Waking up, I saw a nurse with a sour face. She just said that everything was fine and that I could go. They had cleared up some question about my health. What test did they do? I asked. She didn’t understand me or preferred to keep quiet. I exited onto a square in Bloomsbury. I didn’t live in the area, as I would have liked to, but that was where they put me to bed, for how long I didn’t know. Maybe to see if I showed any sign of health problems that would affect whether or not I stayed on the official programme of a Brazilian outside his country. Or would there be an unofficial reason, some by-product of minds with parallel powers? I was stuck in some pulpy spy novel, now inoculated with some substance which would make me even more submissive to them—I, my mind clouded, for that reason in particular, would provide them with a key that I was in no position to predict. I was the idiot in the global citadel. I would serve for every job whose sense was beyond me. But I was not going to cry, to bemoan my lot. Catching a plane back to Brazil wasn’t an option.
...
tomorrow none of this will matter, when I’ll be able to live the life of that man who is still lying in the Bloomsbury hospital bed, who stayed there as I made this little escape, motivated by the nurse’s bad intentions. There lies a part of me that has stopped, without any thought of controlling the world or what goes on inside itself, a waiting stone. I’ll go back in the dead of night, I’ll lift up the sheet and lie down. And when the Englishman comes back, I’ll see that the experiment has worked. I’ll be that man again, ready to hold forth in public spaces on the questions that afflict his students who stubbornly refuse to show themselves.
(from https://www.catranslation.org/online-exclusive/an-english-gent/)
The novel, particularly from that point on, becomes increasingly fevered and surreal, with an increasingly strong sexual angle. The book seems to be about, if anything the effects of globalisation - the narrator says: I had come to this end of the world for that, to occupy an intermission without end but this isn't a novel to read searching too closely for analogies.
Overall, a powerful and disturbing work, one I appreciated more than the same author's [b:Atlantic Hotel|31921986|Atlantic Hotel|João Gilberto Noll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1475304230s/31921986.jpg|21997158] as it seemed relatively more focused, but still one where the reader really has to simply go with the narration rather than trying to rationalise what is happening.
3.5 stars - rounded up to 4.
The award-winning Brazilian author João Gilberto Noll, five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, spent time around the turn of the millennium as a visiting scholar in UCL, Berkeley in the US, Bellagio in Italy and at the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture & Society at King's College London, as a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation.
He turned his experiences into two novels - this Lorde (2004) and an earlier 2002 work [b:Berkeley em Bellagio|18812941|Berkeley em Bellagio|João Gilberto Noll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1404396289s/18812941.jpg|26748826] - albeit ones with a entirely not-literal treatment of thos experiences. See https://www.academia.edu/9490485/A_Long_Journey_Home_Local_Meets_Global_in_Jo%C3%A3o_Gilberto_Nolls_Berkeley_em_Bellagio for a discussion of both works and particularly the earlier novel.
Lorde has been translated into English, as Lord, by Edgar Garbelotto and published by the consistently excellent Two Lines Press.
Set in London, the novel's epigraph is taken from Iain Sinclair's [b:London Orbital|118186|London Orbital|Iain Sinclair|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328032557s/118186.jpg|113766], based on a walk around the M25:
The secret interiors of these post-human fortresses solicit conspiracy, acts of sexual transgression. Illicit exchanges between dealers.
That post-human fortresses are, in fact, multistory carparks in Watford, and the words inspired by JG Ballard and his novels [b:Crash|70241|Crash|J.G. Ballard|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1281416649s/70241.jpg|68058] and[b:The Atrocity Exhibition|70240|The Atrocity Exhibition|J.G. Ballard|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386923654s/70240.jpg|68057], gives a sense of the surreal nature of Lord.
The novel itself opens with our narrator, a Brazilian who wrote books that were mostly well received by critics but not the public, arriving at Heathrow from Porto Alegre in Brazil, rather disorientated, his trip a result of an invitation from a rather shadow Englishman, his purposes rather unclear.
The narrator is taken by his English sponsor to Hackney - That distant neighborhood in the north of London, full of Vietnamese and Turkish immigrants, outside of what the travel brochures usually showed on the city maps where he is installed in a flat above one of the many Vietnamese restaurants on Mare Street:
(as an interesting aside, Mare Street is also now home to a Brazilian centre, opened since 2004. Whether that is a coincidence, if the reason the author was familiar with the area was that there was, in reality although unmentioned in the novel, already a Brazilian community there, or indeed if somehow the novel itself has attracted a Brazilian community to the area, I can't say)
His initial journey there from central London was on the 55 bus - and for a long while, his travels centre on that bus route, particularly Hackney, the Oxford Circus terminus of the line, and the Bloomsbury area through which it passes, and where he can walk to from those bus stops:
It was a long walk to Oxford Street, where the 55 came and went, but I didn’t know any other means of transportation, other routes. When I’d gotten down to Oxford (sic) I could walk to countless places in the city, no matter how far they were.
Even after a diversion to London Bridge at Borough Market he walks to Oxford Circus and takes the bus back, a journey that makes little logical sense as this bus route map shows:
In some respects, Lord belongs to a series of excellent novel dealing with the disorientation of an artist finding himself in a strange (at least to them) city - the linguist in Ferenc Karinthy's [b:Metropole|3349113|Metropole|Ferenc Karinthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1354902533s/3349113.jpg|3387521], the musician in Kazuo Ishiguro's masterpiece [b:The Unconsoled|40117|The Unconsoled|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1342193138s/40117.jpg|6372970] and, perhaps most apposite, the writer in [b:Budapest|59528|Budapest|Chico Buarque|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386921754s/59528.jpg|429260] by Chico Buarque, a fellow Brazilian writer and a novel written around the same time. This paper compares Budapest and Lord and sets them in context: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=spanish_pubs
But in Gilberto Noll's work, the strangeness is more around the mental disintegration of his narrator. After the Englishman comes to visit him he immediately rushes him to a hospital in Bloomsbury for treatment (for what is unclear, and perhaps hints that some of the narrator's adventures may have been imagined while, in reality, he was sick in bed). And at the hospital he literally splits in two - part of him remains there
At reception I filled out a form. We entered a ward. The Englishman seemed to be on the staff, so at ease was he inside the hospital. He asked me to sit on an unoccupied bed. I sat. Until the person who seemed to be the doctor arrived. He started to examine me. “It is,” he said with a certain harshness. And he asked me to lie down. He called a nurse. She passed some instruments to him. And the doctor inserted a needle in my vein. I don’t remember ever having felt such satisfaction in my whole life. Not because the medication being introduced had a numbing effect that left me out of it. In the following hours I wouldn’t need to do anything to attribute continuity to things. And was, what’s more, without any fear of my destiny from here on, which would be the normal response in a patient about to undergo a medical procedure in any hospital ward. I just didn’t believe that anything worse could happen, that’s all! I trusted the opposite would be true: that during that whole stay in the hospital the man who was starting to throb inside me and who I still didn’t really know would have a better chance to surface. That when I woke from the anaesthetic I would start to live with another hypothesis about myself and that I would work on it in secret, so that not even my own English friend would be able to notice any change in my character or on the surface of my body. They had kept me there for a reason that I didn’t know. I would use it to be born.
I died for the time I was sedated. Waking up, I saw a nurse with a sour face. She just said that everything was fine and that I could go. They had cleared up some question about my health. What test did they do? I asked. She didn’t understand me or preferred to keep quiet. I exited onto a square in Bloomsbury. I didn’t live in the area, as I would have liked to, but that was where they put me to bed, for how long I didn’t know. Maybe to see if I showed any sign of health problems that would affect whether or not I stayed on the official programme of a Brazilian outside his country. Or would there be an unofficial reason, some by-product of minds with parallel powers? I was stuck in some pulpy spy novel, now inoculated with some substance which would make me even more submissive to them—I, my mind clouded, for that reason in particular, would provide them with a key that I was in no position to predict. I was the idiot in the global citadel. I would serve for every job whose sense was beyond me. But I was not going to cry, to bemoan my lot. Catching a plane back to Brazil wasn’t an option.
...
tomorrow none of this will matter, when I’ll be able to live the life of that man who is still lying in the Bloomsbury hospital bed, who stayed there as I made this little escape, motivated by the nurse’s bad intentions. There lies a part of me that has stopped, without any thought of controlling the world or what goes on inside itself, a waiting stone. I’ll go back in the dead of night, I’ll lift up the sheet and lie down. And when the Englishman comes back, I’ll see that the experiment has worked. I’ll be that man again, ready to hold forth in public spaces on the questions that afflict his students who stubbornly refuse to show themselves.
(from https://www.catranslation.org/online-exclusive/an-english-gent/)
The novel, particularly from that point on, becomes increasingly fevered and surreal, with an increasingly strong sexual angle. The book seems to be about, if anything the effects of globalisation - the narrator says: I had come to this end of the world for that, to occupy an intermission without end but this isn't a novel to read searching too closely for analogies.
Overall, a powerful and disturbing work, one I appreciated more than the same author's [b:Atlantic Hotel|31921986|Atlantic Hotel|João Gilberto Noll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1475304230s/31921986.jpg|21997158] as it seemed relatively more focused, but still one where the reader really has to simply go with the narration rather than trying to rationalise what is happening.
3.5 stars - rounded up to 4.
eriknoteric's review
2.0
The biggest problem with "Lord," a finalist for Lambda Literary's best gay fiction this year, is that it was clearly written while João Gilberto Noll was under the influence of drugs. While such a authorial position would have been groundbreaking in the 1970s and 80s, in 2004, when it was written, and in 2019, when it was translated into English, this sort of writing technique is outdated, tired, and ineffective.
"Lord" is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator - a Doestoyevskian-ish Brazilian writer invited to live and work in England. The problem, of course, is for what reason and by whom he is unsure. As a result, he tells his story of wondering around Hackney, having sex and masturbating, and trying to trace out who he is and how he ends up in Liverpool. At the end of the day, each event in this story is without meaning but somehow oddly connected to the story as whole. What that story is, I must confess, is totally unclear.
What a strange book. What an outdated book. So many good, gay stories this year; how did Lamba land on this one?
"Lord" is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator - a Doestoyevskian-ish Brazilian writer invited to live and work in England. The problem, of course, is for what reason and by whom he is unsure. As a result, he tells his story of wondering around Hackney, having sex and masturbating, and trying to trace out who he is and how he ends up in Liverpool. At the end of the day, each event in this story is without meaning but somehow oddly connected to the story as whole. What that story is, I must confess, is totally unclear.
What a strange book. What an outdated book. So many good, gay stories this year; how did Lamba land on this one?
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