Daniel Soar writes:

Fonseca, who is now 83, has been one of those famously reticent writers – he’s a friend of Thomas Pynchon – who chooses to say as little as he can about what his fiction is meant to mean. One of the distractions his biography throws up is that he worked for the Rio police in the 1950s and 1960s: this is supposed to give him a licence to write about violence, as if what he’s giving us is the documentary dope, the news from the street. He doesn’t exactly dispel the illusion. But the writing itself displays a suspicion of reported fact. ‘The Taker’, which was inexplicably not banned by the censors, relates the escalating exploits of a serial killer with an axe to grind (or more precisely a machete, which he sharpens on a ‘special stone’). As the Taker rapes and shoots his way through the streets of Rio, there’s a distinct background hum from the media at large, which distorts his actions and makes them loud. In the story’s logic, no one notices the disappearance of yet another suburban banker until it’s seen to be part of a pattern. ‘No More Safety in the Streets’: it’s not until he dispatches a couple with serious connections that the ‘society columnists’ sit up and take note. He is known in the papers as ‘o louco da Magnum’, or, in Clifford Landers’s clever rendering, ‘the Magnum maniac’. (Sometimes something is added in translation.) But the papers he avidly reads don’t reflect what is revealed by his first-person narration: he’s a poet, too, and he has a lot to give.

(LRB 26 February 2009)

Open Letter | hardback 166 pp. |ISBN: 9781934824023