The Shape of Bones

June 19, 2017
A strikingly potent coming-of-age story set mostly on the streets of Esplanada, a rapidly changing area in northeast Brazil in the early 1990s, Galera’s novel moves seamlessly between past and present to deliver a moving portrait of a man haunted by the ghosts of his youth and a senseless tragedy that would change the course of his life. The unnamed narrator in the present day, known only as Hermano in flashbacks to his childhood, is visiting the old neighborhood en route to pick up a friend for an ambitious and dangerous rock-climbing expedition that “promised to be the biggest adventure of his life.” But upon entering Esplanada in the early morning, he is struck by the return of a crippling shame that he thought he had left behind long ago. The past catches up to the present as he intervenes in a gang conflict eerily reminiscent of one that he had fled from as an adolescent. Examining masculinity and the responsibility we have to others in violent yet hauntingly intimate scenes, Galera (Blood-Drenched Beard) illuminates the murky spaces between who we believe ourselves to be and who we really are. The result is a harrowing, expertly structured work of fiction.

June 15, 2017
Young Brazilian novelist and translator Galera (Blood-Drenched Beard, 2015) returns with a slender tale of yearning and memory.The difference between men and boys, the old witticism has it, is the price of their toys. As our story opens, a 10-year-old boy goes tearing around his Brazilian city on a much-hacked bicycle, a self-designated "elite urban cyclist" who rockets across the landscape while avoiding cars and impediments such as "an unfinished cement wall whose surface looks as though bits of human skin and flesh would adhere to it nicely." The decades pass, and now our boy--who has made good in life while avoiding trouble as assiduously as he did that wall--has been goaded into one great adventure, scaling an unclimbed Andean peak in the company of a childhood friend. The challenge steers him into a trip down Memory Lane, revisiting kids bearing names such as Walrus, Mononucleosis, and Chrome Black. Walrus, for one, now has a dignified name, a fat wallet, and an impossibly beautiful wife, but others haven't made out so well--and one didn't make it out of childhood at all, in a scarring episode that puts a dark edge on any pleasant nostalgia. Galera guides his story skillfully into and out of past and present, capturing the geeky pleasures of what is now ancient technology ("It's a 386 DX. With thirty-three megahertz and four megabytes of RAM memory") and the touching vulnerability of young people who think they're immortal, as opposed to adults who are afraid of their own shadows. The storyline as such is a little thin, but Galera's larger theme would seem to be how we reckon with the things we've done and seen, how we negotiate the roads not taken and deal with our mountains of regrets (our protagonist having just "walked out on an atmosphere of marital acrimony that could have been resolved quickly with a little compassion and a few well-chosen words"). An elegant meditation on the passage of time and its discontents.

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March 15, 2017
One of Granta's Best Young Brazilian Novelists, Galera got some attention here with the stylishly noirish Blood-Drenched Beard but is expected to break out with this new work. It features a young man taking a mental detour as he travels to the Andes for some mountain climbing. Recalling his coming of age in Esplanada, where he hung out with a tough bunch whose increasingly risky behavior served as male rites of passage, he reveals a horrific incident that scars him still.

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