The Sun on My Head

April 1, 2019
A clutch of stories exploring the perilous and complex inner lives of residents of Rio's favelas. This taut debut collection is mostly populated by young men who've been quickly hardened by the druggy, violent milieu of Brazil's slums, where "sorry's a feeling you get and lose quick," as one narrator puts it. But most tend to be spectators, not participants, and none are so hardened that their characters lapse into gangland clichés. The drug-dealer-adjacent narrator of "Lil Spin" just wants to avoid being hassled by a cop for smoking a blunt on the beach; in "The Tag," a veteran graffiti artist is trying to keep painting despite having a son at home and violence in the air; a recovering crack addict in "Padre Miguel Station" laments the drug's impact on his old neighborhood, down to the pregnant junkie he spots on one grim visit; and the hero of "The Crossing" is a low-level thug ferrying a corpse to a landfill, though Martins wryly allows a sliver of guilt to slip inside him. ("He was so sure he was done for, he even started thinking about God.") Martins' prose (via Sanches' translation) is fast-paced and slangy ("riding dirty's a cinch, the parley's slick") while preserving the flavor of its Portuguese source; the word "perrengue," slang for "problem," stands untranslated for a kind of struggle remembered with a certain fondness ("We've been through plenty of perrengues together"; "one person's perrengue can be another's joy"). That word crystallizes the retrospective mood of these 13 stories, which are more sketches of remembered moments than full-bodied tales. At their best, though, Martins' sketches are remarkably powerful, as in "The Case of the Butterfly," in which a boy watches a butterfly sink in a pan of frying oil and recognizes a symbol of his impending fate. A tough-and-tender study of street life.

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April 22, 2019
Young men contend with the violence and corruption of Rio de Janerio in this tantalizing debut from Brazilian Martins. The characters in these stories represent a full spectrum of favela life, from the aspiring graffiti artist, Fernando, who longs to give his son a better childhood than his father offered him (“The Tag”) to the drug pusher forced to dispose of the body of a customer he kills in a fit of pique (“The Crossing”). In “Spiral,” a student who commutes to a tony neighborhood becomes obsessed with its residents, “who inhabited a world unknown to me”; he stalks one for months before he sees in his subject’s “eyes the horror of realization.” Martins’s characters and the situations they navigate grab the reader’s attention, but he often shies away from offering a resolution. “TGIF” defies this tendency, accompanying its protagonist on a harrowing subway ride to score drugs in a distant favela and ending in a confrontation with a crooked cop. In Martins’s Rio, every interaction is a negotiation, and everyone is “in the same boat: hard up, dopeless, wanting to chill beachside.” This is a promising work from an intriguing new voice.

May 15, 2019
Brazilian writer Martins' fiction debut is a collection of 13 vaguely narrative profiles of young men trying to understand their lives in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. They smoke weed, sell weed, and notice the smell of weed lingering on the clothes of passersby in the streets. A boy steals his security-guard father's gun to show it to his friends. A young man steals purses for kicks, another relapses into an old graffiti habit, while another runs into trouble disposing of a body. Drugs and poverty color them, but these brief voice-driven stories are firmly about the hopes and desires of the young men of Rio. With slang-laden, boldly voiced prose that grounds readers in a unique place, Martins transports readers to the streets and beaches of Rio. In much the way that Edward P. Jones' writing breathes life into the Washington D.C. that lies beyond Pennsylvania Avenue, Martins' stories animate and humanize the people of a city whose humanity is often obscured by its own reputation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)