Updike’s `Brazil’ releases heat of Latin American love

BRAZIL, by John Updike, Knopf, 272 pages, $23.

More than 60 years ago, Virginia Woolf shocked and delighted readers with her pseudo-biography of Vita Sackville-West, “Orlando,” in which the title character, a 16th century male poet, achieves fame and longevity in an adventurous, amorous life that spans three centuries and includes his transformation from a man to a woman. John Updike’s newest novel, “Brazil,” is much in the tradition of Woolf’s satire on the vagaries of desire and of male-female conflicts. But this saucy mixture of love, lust, hate, betrayal and loss also ambitiously reassesses racist attitudes by featuring its own unique and unbelievable metamorphosis.

Despite the publisher’s claim, this work is not “a celebration of love” so much as a revelation of the way people create their loves, lives, and fates out of thin air, and remain transfixed by the magic of one moment’s passion. This is a tale of Tristao, a young black boy from the slums of Rio de Janeiro, and Isabel, the upper-class white girl he picks up on the beach, where her pale bathing suit gives the “impression of total public nudity.” Their first sexual encounter is an ill-fated, audacious act that will merge their lives and seal their destinies, for both are frantically, fantastically and magnetically bound together by sex, love and violence.

In a story reminiscent of the medieval tales of the lovers, Tristan and Iseult, Updike invests their erotic affair with a mythic quality by his use of brilliantly colorful, sensual descriptions with angular, almost geometric, images as counterpoints. The reader can feel the undulating heat of Brazil, experience the fear and the power and the hope of desperate love, as well as the anger of betrayal and loss. To Tristao, Isabel is “not death but her whiteness (has) death’s purity,” and he recognizes from the first “how precarious and arbitrary was the perfect love.” What keeps them together is their “fanatic faith in the nearly impossible.” Who could ask for a more reasonable definition of love?

Love has created Tristao and Isabel and their fate is their identity as lovers. But Isabel’s father thinks that “love is a dream, … the anaesthetic Nature employs to extract babies from us.” Perhaps this is why the love of Tristao and Isabel is sterile, for Isabel has plenty of babies, none of them Tristao’s. As Tristao and Isabel escape from her father by running to the gold

mines and to the Mato Grosso, the jungles, the author presents for us an eerie view of exploitation, infidelity and violence. Updike portrays Isabel as an archetype of all women who are, by their very nature, he says, unfaithful. Yet, it is her infidelity which allows them to survive. And Tristao seems to be more affecionate in the face of Isabel’s adultery and also gives in to his own sexual liaisons with other women.

After a series of misadventures, Tristao and Isabel undergo a magical, mystical transformation which changes their relationship even as they cling to each other. After retracing their steps to confront Isabel’s defeated and disappointed father, Tristao confesses that he has found his “fate and the purpose of (his) life in loving” Isabel. Yet, Trista tells Isabel, ” `for a man to love, … is unselfish,’ but `for a woman to love is selfish’ ” because ” `it is her nature to love’.” For readers unused to Updike’s ironic, irreverent, and often misogynistic views of human sexuality, Brazil seems to be more about animal lust and unbridled sexual exploration than about the romanticized “Tristan and Iseult” love affair in the hearts of modern readers. But we must recall how sensual, how vigorously, violently sexual were the men and women of previous centuries.

This is not “just a love story”; nor is it merely a sexually explicit piece of trash. “Brazil” is about the inherent problems in male-female relationships and is also about the racism that afflicts us all — regardless of color. Black is a shade of brown, as is white, Updike reminds us. And it is the racist stereotypes which are mirrored by sexist stereotypes which Updike reveals here. “Brazil,” thus, is worth reading for the sensual details as well as the entrancing imagery and the old-fashioned “romance” in which the hero and heroine must confront their antagonists and the terror and abandon of “true” love must justify our faith in them and their choice on a bright Brazil day.

Linda L. Labin is an associate professor of English at Husson College.