GLR July-August 2023

Khoury-Ghata gives us a writer issuing page after page of grievance over people who have snubbed her and lovers who have rejected her. Her cruelty to her sur viving daughter Alya is encapsulated when, in a moment of clarity, Tsvetaeva confesses: “Your daughter could have been a great scholar if you had not rele gated her to domestic chores under the pretext that you had to write.” In a shocking display of callousness and neg lect, she reports that she pulled the eleven-year-old Alya out of a boarding school where she was happy, so that the child could perform household duties at home. Another instance of cringe-wor thy behavior occurs when Khoury Ghata’s Tsvetaeva proposes to name their son after one of her male lovers, against her devoted husband’s wishes. A moment of insight summarizes much of the narrative, as the Tsvetaeva figure reflects on herself, to herself: “You throw

yourself headlong into people, drown them under the waves of your feelings, demand that they listen. They must share your unhappiness, accept your jus tifications. Declare you innocent.” Fit tingly, the poet once again rejects agency by speculating that this process might be due to the early loss of her mother. If Vénus Khoury-Ghata intended her biographical novel to be poetic, she has succeeded in that this book conveys a strong feeling of the pain and hardship that her subject endured. If the author wanted to evoke sympathy for Tsve taeva, the novel falls short. Tsvetaeva observes accurately at one point: “Peo

Marina Tsvetaeva, 1911. Max Voloshin photo.

ple admire your writing, not you.” A second-person narrative certainly fosters a sense of close familiarity. Unfortunately, in this case, even though it is fiction, readers may feel they have heard too much.

Ride the Snake

A T ONE POINT in João Gil berto Noll’s bizarre, surreal, and sexy novel Hugs and Cud dles, the narrator finds himself in the dark room of a bathhouse. “You couldn’t see anything at all,” he writes. “You were touched and could reciprocate the touch or not. The body that wanted to play with me had a calm demeanor; once

truly, brutally in love”) becomes a deep, en during passion and the central focus of the book. Years later, João discovers that the friend has been seduced by the crew of a German submarine lurking in the harbor of Porto Alegre. The friend, who has tattooed his penis, becomes part of a sleazy maritime brotherhood whose objective is to “experi

P HILIP G AMBONE

HUGS AND CUDDLES by João Gilberto Noll

Translated by Edgar Garbelotto Two Lines Press. 274 pages, $14.95

in a while it would just tell me come, come, and I’d ask myself where the hell does this guy want to take me? Isn’t he satisfied with kissing, our close breaths, masturbating each other, my finger wrecking his ass? Where else do I need to go? Our ran dom pairing alone could embody an obscene graciousness all by itself.” “Obscene graciousness” quite aptly describes, as well, the plot and style of this modern Brazilian “epic written in a trance.” It’s a novel that many readers will find, as this reviewer cer tainly did, both immensely entertaining and utterly mystifying throughout its single, unbroken, almost 300-page paragraph. Exploring the interplay between reality and imagination, Noll pulls out all the stops, taking his narrator, whose name is also João, on an “itinerary of ... interior action.” The plot, if Hugs and Cuddles may be said to have a plot, concerns the narrator’s obsession with the “engineer,” a child hood friend with whom he innocently used to wrestle, “working surreptitiously so our true intentions could remain unnoticed.” “Our dicks,” the narrator notes, “were ahead of our maturity.” His unconsummated sexual attraction for the friend (“I was Philip Gambone is the author of five books, including the novel Beijing and thememoir As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II . 34

ment with the vortex of libido.” He completely submits to the Germans’ hypermasculine desires and whims. “I wished I could get closer and give him a hug, then a cuddle,” the narrator wist fully says. He relieves his homosexual frustration with anony mous sexual encounters, fucking strangers in deserted alleys or in the bathroom of a movie theater. Meanwhile, he tries to trans fer this “blinding, disorienting lust” to the job of maintaining a heterosexual family. His wife and teenage son, who is blessed with a “torso from the movies,” are the only people who ground him, even if just a little. When João learns that the German submarine has sunk off the coast of Angola, he becomes obsessed with trying to find out whether his friend survived: “I ignored the credibility of sources. The problem was that, for me, fidelity or not didn’t make any difference anymore. The fiction of things ensnared me to the point where I was unable to untangle myself from it.” The jumble of fantasies and voices inside the narrator’s head— that “fiction of things”—becomes as real for him as whatever events actually do take place. He wakes up (a phrase that occurs more than once in the novel) to discover that the engineer friend is there, touching his hand. The friend has survived the accident and is back in Porto Alegre. “Or was he a specter created in my thoughts?” the narrator wonders.

TheG & LR