I Didn't Talk

Starred review from May 7, 2018
Brazil’s Bracher arrives in English with this brilliant, enigmatic rumination of a novel. Gustavo, a recently retired professor, prepares to sell his family home and move away from São Paulo. The process triggers a flood of reminiscences about his parents; his career; his wife, Eliana; and his involvement with the resistance to the military regime that seized Brazil in the 1960s. Gustavo relates how his arrest and torture by the authorities precipitated the killing of Eliana’s brother, Armando, even as he insists, “I didn’t talk.” Nevertheless, Gustavo reflects that the experience turned him into a “sad and troublesome monster.” He shunned responsibility and instead attempted to redeem himself as a father and an educator, even as “Armando was always there, submerged in my thoughts.” Bracher writes that “interrogation, doubt, and listening are ways of doing,” and her novel is more concerned with investigating the sublimation of guilt than it is in answering the question of whether or not Gustavo betrayed Armando. Her refusal to allow Gustavo “to stop and put all these old things in order” transforms what could have been a conventional story about coming to terms with the past into a potent portrait of an agitated mind. Bracher is a force to be reckoned with and has crafted a haunting, powerful novel.

June 1, 2018

A major award-winning author in Brazil appearing in English for the first time, Bracher grew up under the military dictatorship and here depicts how invidiously it bent people's lives. Gustavo, a professor about to retire to the countryside, was arrested in 1970 with brother-in-law Armando; both were horribly tortured, but only Gustavo was released. Everyone assumes that he talked, thus condemning Armando to death, but while Gustavo maintains his innocence, he is burdened with guilt and the sorrow of having lost both a close friend and his own wife, who died in Paris during his imprisonment. Interestingly, Bracher doesn't focus on the prison experience, instead showing Gustavo working through his overall memories. As he contemplates his professional papers and an autobiographical manuscript by brother José that feels subtly inaccurate, Bracher effectively reveals how Gustavo both dodged and absorbed painful suspicions about his past. VERDICT An arresting work, told in stringently beautiful prose; for all smart sophisticated readers.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2018
Pensive novel of political terror and its consequences, set in the shadow of post-junta Brazil.Born in 1961, just in time to experience the military dictatorship for herself, Bracher turns out a somber slice-of-life narrative centering on a professor who, after a long career in education, is preparing to leave the academy, sell his house, and move to the countryside. Gustavo knows that when he leaves his home, "a developer will tear it down, like all the other old homes nearby." It doesn't matter, for he lives in his mind, and there he faces incapacitating guilt over the death of his late wife's brother, arrested with him as student activists in 1970. "Look, I was tortured," he protests, "and they say I snitched on a comrade who was later killed by soldiers' bullets." Protest as he might that he didn't do it, that he didn't talk, Gustavo worries endlessly at his responsibility for Armando's death--and the death of his grieving wife afterward, "without ever finding out that I'd said what I never said." Scarred by his experiences in prison, Gustavo has scarcely dared profess a political view since; in fact, he confesses, he is retiring from his job "out of cowardice," precisely to avoid getting caught up in a revolt against changes in the very pension system that will provide his keep even as he is cheated out of part of it. He protests further: "I was never a revolutionary, never participated in the enthusiasm." He protests, in the end, too much, and the reader is left to mistrust a narrator who has rationalized for half a century that his comrade and friend, though not deserving death, brought his fate on himself. Bracher's story turns in on itself, revisiting those long-ago moments from the point of view of an old, tired man consumed by the deeds and misdeeds of youth.A slender but memorable contribution to the literature of crime and (sometimes self-inflicted) punishment.

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