Good literature is not always a synonym of immediate success with the public. There are authors who take decades to be acknowledged according to the standards of their work. But there are others that in little time capture the attention of critics and interest of readers.

This is the case of Milton Hatoum, the writer from the northern Brazilian state of Amazonas who is living in São Paulo, in the southeast of the country.

His second novel, The Brothers (Dois Irmãos), which won Brazil's Pullitzer, the Jabuti, has already sold 30,000 copies in Brazil alone. As well as that, the author has been translated into several languages including English, French, German and Dutch. And in 2003, he crossed another border, when translated into Arabic.

"The Brothers" was published in Lebanon, country considered the exchange center between the East and West and that has a special meaning for the writer, since it is the land of his ancestors.

"My father was a Lebanese Muslim. My mother is Brazilian, but is also the daughter of Muslims," says Hatoum, who was born in Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas, in 1952, and at the age of 15, he went to live in Brasília, capital of Brazil.

At the age of 17, he moved to São Paulo, where he studied architecture, at the São Paulo University (USP). He then lived in Spain and France, before coming back to Manaus, where he taught literature for 15 years, at the Federal University of Amazonas. In 2001, he moved again to São Paulo.

All this migratory movement made of him an un-rooted man, as would say the Franco-Bulgarian Tzevetan Todorov. Due to being the son of an immigrant, Hatoum was able to structure the plots in his novels very well, expressing the feeling of the Syrian-Lebanese and their descendants in Brazil.

His first book, A Tale of a Certain Orient, (Relatos de um certo Oriente) of 1989, also a Jabuti winner, is about the memories of a Lebanese family in the northern state of Amazonas.

And The Brothers has family conflict as its central theme, a sort of rereading of the biblical twins Esau and Jacob, classic recurrence in literature, as in 19th century Brazilian author Machado de Assis and Guy de Maupassant, the French author from the same period.

In the book, narrated in first person, the story is set in Manaus from 1910 to 1960, and is centered on the conflict between the twins Omar and Yaqub. Their parents are Lebanese immigrants who come to Brazil still young, meet here and get married.

The two brothers never get along, until Yaqub has to leave to Lebanon. On his return, five years later, he feels dislocated within his own family, while the intrigues carry on. In fact, the feeling of displacement is what gives body to the narrative, and brings family drama to a universal sphere.

According to Hatoum, the immigrant is a divided person, suffering from some kind of duality of his home, his country. In this sense, the two brothers act as a metaphor of this duality.

One of them more identified with Brazil and the other feeling a foreigner, different, many times referred to simply as "the other one" by the narrator, who, in his turn, is also dislocated, son of the maid with one of the twins, but not knowing which one of them.

Good Acceptance in Lebanon

The book translator, Safa Jubran, Arabic and Arab literature professor at USP, says The Brothers was very well accepted in Lebanon. According to her, the contact with Brazilian authors in the Arab community is still very small.

"But this can change. It will depend on the promoters' work, and the interest of editors such as Dar Al-Farabi, which published Hatoum's book.

Jubran is a bilingual translator, working both from Portuguese to Arabic as the other way around. Amongst her works are the translations of Miramar, a novel by the Egyptian Naguib Mahfuz (Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988), and Season of Migration to the North, by the Sudanese Tayed Salih.

To her, translation of The Brothers was at the same time challenging and pleasurable. "It was great responsibility to try to recreate this text in Arabic. The difficulties were on many levels, and the greatest was to work the regionalist traces on the book, both geographic and linguistic," she says.

Manaus appears in the novel as a background, a city distant from the other sceneries, in the middle of the Amazon jungle, in a time rich, with the rubber boom, but decadent at that moment.

Its cultural diversity is there, represented by words from Arabic to others originated in the indigenous languages, and by human types, such as Indians, Portuguese, Lebanese, Americans and other adventurers.

Arab Contribution

Hatoum's work is an example of the contribution of Syrian-Lebanese immigrants to the plurality of Brazilian culture. Their descendants landed here, at the end of the nineteenth century, propagating not only trade practices, but also cuisine, dance, music and words.

Representing these are many of the great Brazilian writers, such as Jamil Snege, from the southern state of Paraná, Miguel Jorge, from Goiás, in the Midwest, Raduan Nassar (considered by Hatoum as the greatest Brazilian author alive) from São Paulo, and late Antônio Houaiss, philologist and lexicographer from Rio Grande do Sul, in the South, one of the greatest this country ever had.

After two novels showing the Brazilian-Arab panorama, Milton Hatoum will change his airs a bit. But not too much. His next book is due to be launched in the end of August, and to be called Cinzas do Norte (Ashes of the North).

"This time there will be no participation of Arab immigration. But the story is once again about family drama," he tells. It is to wait and see. The style, the reader already knows is one of the best.

Excerpt from The Brothers

"In about 1914, Galib inaugurated the restaurant Biblos on the ground level of the house. Lunch was served at eleven, simple food, but of rare flavor. He himself, widower Galib, cooked, helped serve and cultivated the vegetable garden, covering it with a tulle veil to avoid the scorching sun. At the Municipal Market, he would choose a fish, a tucunaré or a matinxã, stuff it with farofa and olives, bake it in the firewood oven and serve it with sesame seed sauce. He would enter the restaurant dining room with the tray balanced on the palm of his left hand the other hand around the waist of his daughter Zana. They would go from table to table and Zana would offer guaraná, sparkling water, and wine. The father talked in Portuguese with the restaurant's clients: peddlers, vessel commanders, hucksters, workers at the Manaus Harbor. Since its inauguration, the Biblos had been a meeting place for Lebanese, Syrian and Moroccan Jews, immigrants that lived at Nossa Senhora dos Remédios Square and in the surrounding blocks. They spoke Portuguese mixed with Arabic, French and Spanish, and from this gibberish arose stories that were entwined, lives in transit, a sea of voices that discussed a little of everything: a shipwreck, black fever at a village on Purus river, a prank, incest, remote memories and the more recent topics: living pain, a burning passion, losses still being mourned, the hope that default customers pay their debts. They ate, drank, smoked and their voices stretched out the ritual, delaying the siesta."

Service

The Brothers can be found in English on Amazon.com (The Brothers) and in Arabic on  www.almaktabah.com.

This article appeared originally in Anba - www.anba.com.br.

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