GLR July-August 2023

nal hell of the libido.” There are lots more jolts, reversals, and surprises along the way. Some may tickle you; others may gross you out. For my part, after a while I found myself giving in to the madcap wackiness, enjoying the crazy ride that Noll was taking me on. Noll, who died in 2017, won the Prêmio Jabuti, Brazil’s major literary award, five times. He was just as popular with the public as he was with the prize givers. According to Stefan Tobler, another of his translators, the “transgressive, queer power of [his novels] had a magnetic pull on young readers and writers brought up largely on a diet of social realist and region alist fiction.” The topsy-turvy nature of sex and desire is some thing Noll doesn’t shy away from. Rather, he allows his characters to tumble about in the messy wash of the libido’s ur gency. At the same time, like Carnival season in Rio, there is a serious underpinning to this zany kaleidoscope of a novel. Amid all the erratic and unpredictable hurly-burly lurks an important question: how to “be a man at peace with his own story”? Noll’s genius is to let this existential question we all wrestle with resonate in delicious irresolution. “Everything con fused me,” the narrator says, “but I know this confusion was part of a game I played so I wouldn’t grow too attached to any par ticular role at home. Because the future hides surprises, you know.” The narrator’s willingness to accept surprises and go along with the unpredictability of life—to run away, as he says late in the novel, “from any story that wanted to enslave me to my recent or remote past”—is Noll’s invitation to his readers to consider the possibilities of an unbridled, radical openness.

For October

Tellme Tellme Tellme

What good can we do?

Hold me close —hold onto the puckered peaks of my skin.

I’ll volunteer for her. Live her days until I die.

Bless her name and moisten my eyes all the way into darkness.

Sing her celebrations in celibacy—a union of loneliness and me.

To be with her is less than being for her.

Tell me how severe my frailty is beneath her agile thumbs. Tell me how soft my aging skin feels in the second after this death. K AIT A USTIN

Surrealism is the conventional label to describe Noll’s tech nique, but I’m not sure that moniker does full justice to what it’s like to read this novel, adroitly translated by Edgar Garbe lotto. Past and present time, “actual” events and imagined ones, loosely drift one into the other. At one point, the narrator tells us he has died. Or perhaps he only imagines that he has. Who knows? Indeed, the “road-trippy character” of the book, as writer John Trefry once described Noll’s style, adds to both the fun and the reader’s bafflement. The tongue-in-cheek moral of this novel may be to be care ful what you wish for, because the narrator eventually does end up closer—a lot closer—to his former adolescent crush. He dis covers that he has been transformed into a woman, albeit a woman with a penis: “Unprecedented genitalia had formed be tween my legs, something close to a vulva, without a doubt, but perhaps still preserving some masculine attributes ... eager to have the ability to penetrate.” By day, he manages the domes tic chores; by night, he bores his dick into the engineer’s deli cious ass. Talk about gender fluidity! The screwball spirit of the novel’s ever-morphing events plays with the nature of identity, sexuality, desire, and “the eter

July–August 2023

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