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 When Peter Robb's book A Death in Brazil was published in 2004 I tried to read it but gave up towards the end as I found it to be nothing more than a dull travelogue padded out with recollections of previous trips and a bit of historical background. Behind the melodramatic title lay a collection of banal comments, the dirty mind of a schoolboy in relation to sex, unconvincing claims that the author's life had been in constant danger and feeble attempts to create local characters.
There was an element of fantasy about this persistent sex and violence, the kind of fantasy Brazil often sparks in the minds of foreign men. The death in the title refers to P.C. Farias, the financier of former President Fernando Collor de Mello, whose murder in 1996 has still not been satisfactorily explained. This is the thread which runs throughout the book and the only part worth reading although, as we will see later, how much of it Robb actually wrote is questionable. I decided to give the book another try recently when I saw a paperback version in a bookshop. This time I was struck by the lack of references to source material in the text although Robb presents several pages of "Sources and Readings" at the end. This was particularly striking since much of the material covers private meetings, conversations and telephone calls which only an eyewitness could have provided. Since Robb is an Australian who has never lived in Brazil and is not a journalist, it showed remarkable insight. I was also surprised that the reading list did not include Joseph A. Page's excellent work The Brazilians although much of the information on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva echoes Page's account. Nor does Robb give due credit to Veja magazine which broke the initial story, which eventually led to Collor resigning as he was about to be impeached by Congress. There were also clumsy errors, such as describing Portugal as a "Mediterranean country" whereas its coastline is entirely Atlantic or an undocumented claim that one-third of Brazilians are of Italian descent. Robb adopts an idiosyncratic style in which he refers to Indians as "indios" and calls certain people by their first name, such as the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, writer Euclides da Cunha, and ex-President Fernando Collor. This careless approach is typical of a certain kind of foreigner who takes Brazil in a way he would never take another country and shapes it to fit his fantasies and delusions. Plagiarism Claim I was not alone in questioning Robb's sources and methods. At least two Brazilian journalists have accused him of plagiarism. Mario Sergio Conti, who was managing editor of Veja at the time of the Collor revelations and subsequently wrote a long book on the affair called Notícias do Planalto: A Imprensa e Fernando Collor, claimed that Robb had "stolen, plagiarized, copied and paraphrased dozens of sentences" from his book. Conti's accusations appeared in an article in the Folha de S. Paulo. He also wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement. Here is an extract: "Peter Robb invited me to lunch in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of 2001. Robb praised Notícias do Planalto and told me of his plans to write a book about Brazil, Fernando Collor and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. I recommended that he read certain books and gave him phone numbers for both Collor and Lula da Silva. I never heard from him again. When I read A Death in Brazil I was rather shocked. There were nineteen passages in Robb's book that were startlingly similar to passages in Notícias do Planalto. What we are dealing with here is not simply use of information, as is normal in intellectual work. The fact is that entire sentences, lines of reasoning and images recur with only a few words changed. I have prepared translated transcripts of the passages in question from Notícias do Planalto and the corresponding passages from A Death in Brazil. Robb mentions my book only once. On page 313, in the section "Sources and Readings", he says that Notícias do Planalto is a "very fluid and complete account of Fernando's fast rise and faster fall as seen by the journalists of Brazilian press and television, not least of whom [is] the author". This mention in no way justifies the use Peter Robb seems to have made of my book. One wonders if he would have used my book so freely had it been published in English." Another Brazilian journalist, Lucas Figueiredo, claimed that Robb had copied parts of his book on the Farias affair called Morcegos Negros. Robb mentions this book somewhat disparagingly in his "Sources and Readings". (Ironically his description of it as being "disorganized, overexcited and skimpy" fits A Death in Brazil perfectly.) I have not read Conti's or Figueiredo's books so I cannot comment. However, Robb's fly-on-the-wall style of presenting events makes one wonder where he got the information from. The Guardian, which had given Robb's book a rave review, later printed an article about Conti's allegations. At one point, it said, "Robb isn't talking, but an editor at Bloomsbury, his UK publisher, says she doesn't believe it's plagiarism since Conti's book is listed as a source. She describes Robb's use of the book as "accepted practice in non-academic non-fiction". Bloomsbury has nevertheless offered Conti fuller credit in the paperback edition." In other words, the publisher agreed that Conti's complaint was legitimate. The Sydney Morning Herald quoted a statement from Robb on the allegations in which he says, "This is ridiculous on one level and very serious as a legal matter." This is a rather stuffy reaction especially as Robb describes Conti as a "canny old Brazilian journalist" who shared a cold beer with him in his book, although he does not name him. At the same time, the newspaper added that "Robb declined to comment on why he thought the plagiarism allegations had been made." A Book of Omissions Indeed A note on the flyleaf describes Robb as someone who "has divided his time among Brazil, southern Italy and Australia during the past quarter century." Apart from naming two other books he has written, that is all we have on Mr. Robb. While Robb is happy to present the reader with interminable descriptions of street scenes, bars and even meals, he tells us almost nothing about himself. The book title has a sub-heading "a book of omissions". The book opens as follows, "Like everyone, I went to Brazil to get away." This vacuous statement gives the impression that he was heading off to start a new life whereas he was just making a visit on a tourist visa. He claims to have spent "the greater part of the year of Fernando's fall making three visits to Brazil". He also says he was in Recife "four years after Fernando's impeachment". Otherwise he is suspiciously vague about time, using phrases like "when summer came I was back in Recife" or "Winter on the northeast seaboard was never cool" as though years had passed. The Sydney Morning Herald is taken in by this and describes Robb's book as "partly a memoir of the 20 years he spent in Brazil". Omitting information rather than providing it marks the book and justifies the sub-heading in one way. It would be useful to find out how well he knows Brazil outside of those parts of the Northeast he mentions. One UK reviewer praises Robb for setting the book outside Rio and São Paulo but Robb's knowledge of São Paulo is so thin that I seriously wonder if he has ever been to the place. He depicts it as a satanic Gotham City, full of wretched Northeasterners, armored cars, armed guards and the uncaring rich. This is Robb's view of the city where I have lived for 11 years, "The immensely rich hover over the city's canyons in their own helicopters, fluttering at sunset between the corporate tower and the gated residence." São Paulo also has "more desperate people than any other urban center on the face of the earth", according to Robb. As I write these words I can look out of my window in the lower middle-class district where I live and what do I see? A sunny sky with no hovering helicopters in sight, kids in the school opposite playing volleyball and having a great time by the sound of their laughter, a couple of women walking their dogs and a group of zeladores (janitors) playing dominoes on a tin table outside a café. Looking in the other direction I can see a group of homeless men queuing up to get some food from a shelter. They are a ragged bunch but none of the local people is afraid of them. A girl is washing the windows of a shop nearby and a flock of parakeets shrieks past in a flash of green. Not a desperate face in sight. As for Rio, his knowledge seems to extend to the narrow strip of Copacabana with its hustlers and hookers, the only stretch of Brazil a certain type of tourist ever gets to know. More importantly, do Robb's travels have any purpose other than to kill time and fill his notebooks with trivia? For example, he describes a visit to Canudos, site of Euclides da Cunha's book Os Sertões, in which absolutely nothing of interest happens. Thankfully he only stayed there for the day and caught the bus back to Salvador that night or who knows how many more pages of tedium the reader would have faced. He also visited Garanhuns in Pernambuco where Lula was born on another pointless trip. This time he claims he wanted to sample buchada de bode, a dish made of goat meat "analogous to Scottish haggis, only much more interesting" whatever that means. Does Robb really have nothing better to do with his life than visit somewhere like Garanhuns to try a goat stew? Five pages are devoted to a trip which was not worth five words. Amazing Amazon Adventure Another time we learn that, "Once I spent several weeks flying into the continent, hopping from city to city as far as Manaus on the Amazon", as though he had gone on a search for Mr. Kurtz through the Heart of Darkness. I once made this trip the other way round, going from Manaus to Recife. The flight was uncomfortable and lasted about 15 hours, with stopovers in various Amazon and Northeastern towns like Santarém, Belém and Terezina. But what's the big deal? Flying across the Amazon with Varig is about as adventurous as flying from Frankfurt to Zurich with Lufthansa; it just takes longer. As for Manaus, it is a bustling modern city with a tax-free zone where multinational companies mass produce washing machines, DVDs players and televisions, not some isolated Indian village. Perhaps it is fortunate that we never learn why Robb was "flying into the continent", where he went and what he did during these "several weeks". An Internet search reveals that Robb lived in Italy for 15 years and worked as a teacher. According to the London Telegraph, he used to make three-month forays to Brazil "as often as he could". There are quite a lot of middle-aged foreign men who do this, visiting towns and cities in the Northeast in search of sex. I am not saying that Robb was a sex tourist but most Brazilians would probably suspect that this was the reason for his visits. Neither the Telegraph interviewer nor Robb raises this matter but Robb confirms his casual approach to research, "I'm not a great reader of history, but I like plundering books for the interesting bits." As this statement shows, Robb was obviously not a history teacher. This is obvious from his skimpy knowledge of Brazilian politics when he is not using other people's material. His comments on the Fernando Henrique Cardoso years are trite. How can anyone take seriously a statement like, "FHC brought some calm to Brazilian politics but the greater monetary stability made life harder for many Brazilians.. Many felt as damaged by his measures as they had been by the freeze in 1999." This shows Robb's ignorance of life in contemporary Brazil. I defy him to present anyone who thinks that Cardoso's defeat of inflation was on a par with Collor's freezing of bank accounts. He also says that Brazil "had burned to emulate" Argentina's exchange rate policy. This is nonsense. Brazil had always taken a different approach to the exchange rate and, before the devaluation of 1999, traded the real within a sliding scale whereas the Argentinean peso was fixed by law to the dollar. It was this flexibility that allowed Brazil to escape the ruin which hit Argentina when the peso finally collapsed under the strain. Robb also claims that the International Monetary Fund imposed conditions on all the candidates in the last presidential election. Neither Lula nor José Serra (whom Robb does not even mention by name but describes as a "surly death's-head") were puppets of the IMF as Robb implies. They just recognized economic reality. In fact, Brazil has just paid back its IMF loans in advance. However, the most fanciful parts of this book are Robb's attempts to portray himself as having been in danger of constant death. This is the standard fear of the "gringo" who thinks that as soon as he appears on the street he will be singled out as a target because of his fair skin and blue eyes. Despite the popular image of Brazil as a country of black and mixed-race people, about half the population is white and being white does not make you any different from anyone else. In the Northeast and Amazon the full-blooded whites might be in the minority but they do not stand out because they walk and talk like Brazilians. Brazilians are color blind in the sense that they will accept that anyone can be Brazilian, regardless of skin color. You might be robbed and murdered because you look like a tourist or are middle class but you will not be robbed and murdered because you are white. People like Robb do not accept this because they like to think they are taking a walk on the wild side every time they step into the street. Kissing and Making Up Chapter 1 starts as follows, "Murders happen anywhere and mine most nearly happened in Rio." He then gives an account of an evening in which he claims to have been trapped in an apartment in Copacabana with a knife-wielding junkie called Adelmo. At one point we are supposed to believe that Adelmo, who had previously considered smashing Robb's head in with a lamp and a chair, held the knife to Robb's throat and said, "Kiss me". Robb consented and gave a "very charged and prolonged kiss". For this he was rewarded with a slash on the arm. This does not say much for Robb's kissing technique but at least he lived to kiss another day and was not murdered. In order to get rid of the knifeman, Robb threatened him. "By name I mentioned the particularly hideous Rio jail where Adelmo would spend the rest of his life" and claimed that this "kicked in to some effect." The idea of a Brazilian criminal being frightened by a foreigner mentioning the name of a jail is laughable. Few criminals are ever caught in Brazil and even then jail sentences are light. Murderers, rapists and robbers are out in the streets within a couple of years. New judicial measures are currently being considered to let even more killers, rapists and robbers out on parole to join the thousands already at liberty. Even if the police had arrived they would certainly not have made any effort to help Adelmo on his way to this unnamed prison. They would have faced the familiar scene of a gringo tourist arguing with spaced-out young man he had picked up in the street, an everyday occurrence in Rio. On another occasion Robb devotes half a page to a description of some boys on a deserted beach who approach him and a woman who is selling drinks. "There was nothing we could do if they attacked us," he says. In fact the boys did not attack him and just walked past. An incident in which he is taken to the local police station builds up to a violent climax but ends equally predictably and he is allowed to go on his way. On another occasion a policeman in Rio threw him against a wall while others searched him - "not gently" - before he was "flung aside" i.e. let go once again unharmed. On another occasion he describes a 30-minute trip on an overcrowded ferry as though he was crossing the river Styx. It ends like a parody. "It was my worse moment in a lifetime of public transport. But we lived." Private transport is no safer and even a simple taxi ride almost ends in his death. "An earlier (taxi) driver had nearly killed me first and then abandoned me in the wrong place miles from anywhere, certainly miles from Guaxumka, wandering by a fetid black swamp seething with unidentifiable creatures as darkness fell with its always startling rapidity." His Telegraph interview contains another near miss with death which has a different version in the book. According to the paper, Robb "decided to confront a ruthless Brazilian politician in a restaurant and accuse him of murdering his own brother." This "ruthless Brazilian politician" was Augusto Farias who is alleged to have been behind the murder of P.C. Farias. Why did Robb do this, asks the Telegraph. "I don't know - one likes a bit of drama in life. And I'd had a certain number of whiskies by that time," he says, like some loveable old buffer from a Graham Greene novel. "I'd been pursuing him for such a long time. I'd given up - that's why I'd drunk too much. Then, suddenly, there he was, a few tables away. I couldn't resist. Walking back to my hotel down an unlit street, I thought, 'This is the stupidest thing I've ever done.' Killings to order in Brazil cost a couple of hundred dollars. It's an industry." Fending off Death with a Fountain Pen In fact, Robb did not "confront" anyone. What he did (or said he did) was to ask the waiter for some notepaper and when it arrived, "(I) whipped out my fountain pen and wrote a florid note to Augusto reminding him of my many calls and proposing we get together for a chat about his brother's death." Graham Greene gives way in this scene to P.G. Wodehouse, with Charley Fortnum from The Honorary Consul being replaced by Bertie Wooster. Not surprisingly Augusto Farias did not feel like having a "chat" with a foreigner who asks a waiter for notepaper and writes a "florid note" in fountain pen when he could have simply stepped across the room and spoken to him. Obviously Augusto had better things to do with a couple of hundred dollars than order Robb's killing and, with one mighty bound, Robb was free once again. The book more or less ends there although not before we are treated to a scene involving "two tortoises locked in an ecstatic and interminable copulation." Robb's book was given generally good reviews by the foreign press, mainly by people who have never set foot in Brazil, and the accusations of plagiarism were dismissed or ignored. I do not know if Robb intends continuing to visit Brazil. If so, it would be interesting to see if he would agree to be interviewed by Brazilian journalists (not Conti or Figueiredo). Surely this is something he or his publisher could consider. In the meantime, Robb's readers abroad can curl up and read about his narrow escapes in this lawless land where crazed knifemen demand kisses from their victims, the bloodsucking rich hover over cities in helicopters and taxi drivers dump foreigners besides fetid black swamp seething with unidentifiable creatures. Notes * The edition of Robb's book referred to was published by Henry Holt and Company of New York. The interview in the Telegraph appeared on June 6, 2004, and the Guardian article on August 24, 2004. The Sydney Morning Herald article appeared on July 3, 2004. Conti's letter to the TLS appeared in July or August 2004 (exact date not known). Conti's article appeared in the Folha on June 21, 2004 and the item on Lucas Figueiredo in the same paper on August 8, 2004.
* For more on the foreigners' fantasies about Brazil - and the real violence committed against foreigners, not the Robb kind of being "most nearly" murdered - see my articles "Brazil - A State of Mind for Foreign Dreamers" from June 2, 2003 and "Foreigners Make Easy Meat for Brazil's Criminals" from December 27, 2003, in the Selected Articles section of Brazil Political Comment www.brazilpoliticalcomment.com.br.
* Other errors include claiming that José Dirceu "organized resistance" when he secretly returned to Brazil from Cuba. Dirceu went to earth in the south of the country and had no contact with any "resistance". He says Collor's home state of Alagoas was "a little state people had barely heard of". Anyone who lives in Brazil knows that Alagoas is infamous for corruption and violence. Robb says Lula means "squid" whereas it is just a nickname for Luis and is coincidentally the word for squid which is "lula". He also describes a bandeirante as a "flag bearer". The word "bandeirante" does not come from "bandeira" as in "flag" but was a specific Brazilian word to describe an armed raiding party or band from São Paulo. The Folha de S. Paulo (not São Paulo as Robb writes) is certainly not the "most influential daily newspaper in Brazil", much as it would like to be. John Fitzpatrick is a Scottish writer and consultant with long experience of Brazil. He is based in São Paulo and runs his own company Celtic Comunicações. This article originally appeared on his site www.brazilpoliticalcomment.com.br. He can be contacted at
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. © John Fitzpatrick 2006
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