Lost in Translation

Book Review: City of God

By Paulo Lins

"Fight and you'll never survive... Run and you'll never escape."

I’m kinda cheating here, and cutting and pasting from amazon.ca, the synopsis of this book:

From Publishers Weekly

Lins's 1997 fiction debut—the source of the 2002 film published in English for the first time—chronicles two generations over three decades in the infamous Rio de Janeiro City of God, "a neo-slum of concrete, brimming dealer-doorways, sinister-silences and cries of despair." From the slum's creation in the early 1960s for flood victims, through the rise of disco and cocaine in the 1970s, to the horrific gang wars of the 1980s, Lins traces the rise and fall of myriad, often teenaged gangsters for whom guns, girls and drugs are the tools of power. While the film traces the divergent paths of two childhood friends, the novel rushes from vignette to vignette, with an ever-changing cast of characters with names like "Good Life," "Beelzebub" and "Hellraiser." Years, and pages, pass in a haze of smoking, drinking, snorting lines of cocaine, dancing sambas, swearing and planning the next big score. Guns dispense justice; the price for disrespect, whether to a spouse, a friend or the favela, is torture or death. Lins, who grew up in the City, lets the horror speak for itself. He serves up a Scarface-like urban epic, bursting with encyclopedic, graphic descriptions of violence, punctuated with lyricism and longing. (Oct.)

So what did I think?

Well, first off, I’m writing this blog posting the day before book cub, so this is just my take on it and not influenced from my fellow clubbers.

I liked it. But I didn’t love it.

Normally this is a book that I would be all over. Just the cover of the book speaks to me, so I thought it would be right up my alley.

But I had a few issues with it:

#1. Like my blog title says, I was lost in translation. The book was originally published in Portuguese and translated into English. I found that the book just did not flow. This in turn made it difficult to follow.

#2. Too many characters. As the synopsis says, this book takes place over two generations of gangsters. So I understand how there would be a number of characters. But when I say there were too many, I mean there were more than thirty characters that were in the novel and I found I had a hard time keeping track of who was in which gang and where their loyalties lay.

#3. I found that it was a difficult book to relate too. Well, ok, that sounds stupid because obviously I’m not a gang member, nor do I associate or hang with gang members (that I know of anyways). I don’t mean it as “I don’t get the lifestyle” more along the lines of I didn’t “connect” with any of the characters. And then just when you got to know a character, they were killed in some horrendous way. (I know that that kind of contradicts my previous comment, as there were so many gangsters and they mostly all died, but I felt little compassion for them when they met their demise. I don’t like this.)

#4. I hated the police in this book. HATED THEM! They were as bad as the gangsters and I was disgusted with the contribution that they played in the world they were supposed to help lead and protect. Throughout most of the novel, they were as bad (and sometime worse) then the gangsters that they were supposed to be apprehending.

It was brutal BRUTAL book. One that makes me truly appreciate the country I live in, one where you don’t have to fear for your life each time you leave your house.

I really appreciated the honesty of the book.  Lins did not try to sugar coat anything in his descriptions of his world that was overrun with gang bangers and murderers. Because that’s essentially what they were…cold blooded murderers.

I found this book really opened my eyes. Rio de Janeiro is not a city that I knew anything about, nor had I ever heard of the turmoil that they experienced through the last few decades.

But will I read it again? Probably not.

There was a movie made in 2002 based on the book and I will defiantly be picking that up this weekend. I have heard it is fabulous and I look forward to seeing it!

Cheers!