2023-08-17 05:25:00
In a black novel as voluminous as it is dense and intriguing, Joe Thomas takes us to a country torn between Lula and Bolsonaro alongside a police inspector keen on justice.
It is the evening of October 7, 2018 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The streets are still empty. The first round of the presidential election has just placed Jair Bolsonaro well ahead. The second seems already acquired. Three lads feel their wings growing. A gay man has the misfortune to go through this. Impunity infuses. They melt, all in muscles, on the passerby who, aggravating factor, wears a T-shirt “Ele nao”, “not him”, slogan of the anti-Bolsonaro left. For two of them, the beating is enough. The third seeks death and the lesson. Knife stuck in the throat. The V for victory slashed on the chest, and a swastika. A few streets away, a young woman is tagging the famous slogan on a wall. This time, spotted by two officers of the police militar, won over to the madman who is about to take power. The girl is arrested and then assaulted for no reason. Widespread impunity.
Brazilian Psycho opens like this. As a statement. Then goes back, fifteen years earlier, in January 2003. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has just been sworn in as President of Brazil for the first time. Bolsonaro’s antithesis. The hope of workers in an unequal country, a future legend of the world left which is already a bit. What happened between the two? Joe Thomas, the author, lived ten years in Sao Paulo. He recounts Brazil as he knew it. From the largest of its cities, through its crimes, its inequalities, its disappointments. The great story is woven with the work of Mario Leme, an inspector with a taste for justice that is a little too pronounced in an institution that seeks easy culprits. His first investigation with the civil police with his partner Ricardo Lisboa: the murder of the director of the British School, killed in his room with a book press that has disappeared. They are asked for a quick result: flush out a small strike from the nearest favela, Paraisópolis, the city of Paradise. But Mario Leme will never let go.
The thread is pulled in an advancing Brazil. There is the hope of seeing the money finally redistributed, the poor getting out of it. Often plagued by corruption that sniffs out easy-to-embezzle money in government social policies. And the looming Bolsonaro nightmare. Joe Thomas tells us all this in a striking style, with a lot of humanity, through a series of complex characters with linked destinies. Delinquents, lawyers, a former CIA agent, crooked politicians. A very dense, dark, intriguing novel, finely constructed enough to keep the reader in a precise fact while drawing the fresco that tells a country.
Brazilian Psycho, Joe Thomas, Seuil, 592 pp, 24 euros.
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