Loved and lost

Victor Heringer’s Glória tells the story of three generations of the Costa e Oliveira family, united by a tradition of “dying of heartbreak”. The novel was first published in Portuguese in 2013, and is now translated into English by Sophie Lewis and James Young. It is difficult not to read it today without the awareness of Heringer’s own death in 2018, aged twenty-nine, by apparent suicide.

Glória is presented as a novel by “V. Heringer Costa e. O”, written at the request of another reclusive author, Ambrósio Silva Costa e Oliveira. The bulk of this novel within the novel follows the lives of three brothers: Benjamin, who works as an exhibition assistant in a museum, until he quits his job to become an artist; Daniel, a shipping inspector; and Abel, a pastor who returns from missionary work in Africa with a blonde American wife. The brothers were raised by their mother, Noemi, in Rio de Janeiro after their father died – from heartbreak – when they were young; they also made regular visits to their grandmother Dona Letícia in the countryside town of Santa Maria Madalena.

Dona Letícia’s life mission has been writing the “History of the Costa e Oliveira Family”, a chronicle of deaths from heartbreak. When she dies, Abel discovers her thirty-five handwritten volumes and uses her record of a “universal brotherhood” of heartbreak (“everyone the world over is a Costa e Oliveira”) to form the basis for the “Global Church in Christ” – a satire of the neo-Pentecostal Protestantism and its message of prosperity Christianity that has flourished in Brazil in recent decades. A video of Abel’s preaching goes viral, the multitudes assemble in Santa Maria Madalena, but – spoiler alert – it turns out that the gospel is no match for Dona Letícia’s history of endless heartbreak.

The main character, however, is Benjamin, whose story adds much of the absurd comedy that is also a part of this novel’s central vision. Benjamin, who spends much of his time on an internet forum named after Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Aleph”, leaves his wife for a woman he meets online, whom he thinks is his neighbour Paula – only to find out it is a different Paula.

Borges isn’t the only name dropped in an excessively allusive novel that approaches Benjamin’s description of his own art, wherein “the world itself was composed of quotations”. Members of the Aleph forum are named after philosophers and artists, Benjamin’s father makes jokes about Nietzsche and every (short) chapter has an epigraph from everyone (well, mostly men) from Homer to Samuel Beckett. Sometimes these epigraphs neatly express what the novel is about, as with this quote from August Strindberg: “in the most tormented moments of life, we too can laugh with self-conscious raillery”. Mostly, though, this learning feels showy, easy and obvious. Anyone can quote Roland Barthes, and the constant presence of these literary luminaries serves as a reminder of how comparably tame the form of this novel is: inside its metafictional envelope Glória is a conventional realist family saga. That said, it is little the worse for it. And more interesting are Heringer’s own flashes of insight, as when he describes his father as having “the amiable smile of the sceptic, the congeniality of the unbeliever”.

A similar authorial evasiveness dogs the novel’s attempt at humour, and indeed heartbreak: we are told that Benjamin is an absurd figure, or that his father was a comic genius, but Glória itself doesn’t quite convey its characters’ inner pain or crack its own jokes. Heringer reaches at big themes – religion, postmodernity, the impact of the internet, the sadness of being alive – and even if he doesn’t fully find his own voice, we can admire his ambition.

The “Epilogue” informs us that the story we have just read was dictated to “V. Heringer” by the hitherto silent middle brother, Daniel, and that this novel has been so influential that a whole school of Madalenist literature has flourished. “V. Heringer” knows – can dream of – this because he has outlived his creator: the epilogue is dated January 23, 2027.

Kevin Brazil is the author of Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?, 2022

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post Loved and lost appeared first on TLS.