Vultures in the Living Room

By Lula Falcão

Casa Forte Press announces the first English translation of Lula Falcão's Vultures in the Living Room, available in all bookstores and Kindle worldwide.
Falcão--the author of critically acclaimed books including one being adapted to screen—writes from the port city of Recife. His writing is unmistakably original, his satirical and at times absurdist stories provide a direct gateway to universal truths in contemporary Brazil.

Vultures in the Living Room, like Ionesco's post -war Rhinoceros, is an important reflection on human vulnerability during times of political and social uncertainty.


A escrita de Falcão é inconfundivelmente original. Ele equilibra o impossível na narrativa: sua prosa é atemporal, mas profundamente enraizada na obscura história recente do Brasil. São pequenos contos que oscilam entre o absurdo e o sentido e a falta de sentido da vida.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087941059

Book preview

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CASA FORTE PRESS: HTTPS://CASAFORTEPRESS.COM

Copyright © 2017 by Lula Falcão

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Falcão/Casa Forte Press

Decatur, Georgia 30030

https://casafortepress.com

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Book Layout © 2017 Cover by JD Hollingsworth

Book Title/ Author Name. — 1st ed.

ISBN 9781087941028

eISBN 9781087941059

All day, he spied on people’s movements, trying to guess incomprehensible things.

―Graciliano ramos, barren lives

CONTENTS

On Translating Falcão

Editor’s Note

Sea of Mud

Mar de Lama

Grounded in the Dark

Atolados no Escuro

The Man in a Box

O Homem na Caixa

Existence

Existência

Doralice

Doralice

Looking for Carmen

Procurando Carmen

Rifles

Fuzis

Carnaval

Carnaval

Geometry

Geometria

The Envelope

O Envelope

The President

O Presidente

Vultures in the Living Room

Urubus na Sala

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Biographies, Translator and Editor

About the author

Other books by Casa Forte Press

On Translating Falcão

Helena Cavendish de Moura

Diluvial mudslides triggered by changing force fields and, inconveniently, the expansion of the universe are messing with the lives of the characters in Lula Falcão’s Vultures in the Living Room. The landscape of Brazil’s struggling middle class was tenuous enough from decades of military rule, but the added unpredictability of weather phenomena with the arrival of the Anthropocentric age, reorganizes the class struggle into chaos and throws man’s existential dilemmas into some quantum quagmire. 

Simply put: Siqueira, we’re fucked, shouts an exasperated character as the ground begins to stretch.

Falcão, a prolific journalist and author, is a lover of physics and Cinema Novo, Brazil’s New Wave cinema, two important elements in his writing. He is a classic Brazilian intellectual: an autodidact newspaperman with a foot in leftist politics, an Ionesco of the Tropics with an understated pugilistic writing style that never misses a beat. His razor-thin minimalism turns the work of translating into a tiptoe dance around a minefield. One has to respect the pauses, the inferences, and the tight airspace between sentences when following Falcão’s impeccable rhythm. 

Falcão is an outspoken critic of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose extremist, far right administration seeks to undermine the hard -won struggle for equality in one of the most economically and racially unequal countries in the world. In these stories, there is a discreet nod to some of Brazil’s contemporary events and the general oppressive, fascistic tendencies that have emerged since the election of Bolsonaro.  In Man in the Box, Falcão ridicules Brazil’s nostalgia for the brutal military regime, the baroque political oligarchy that has ruled Brazil for centuries. There are references to bizarre weather patterns one would naturally assume as dystopian, futuristic scenarios, but they are actual events that have taken place with two of the monumental man-made disasters of Brumadinho and Mariana, where avalanches of mud razed both communities, tinging the turquoise Atlantic waters with some indescribable lava-like substance packed with toxic waste. Then there is Carmen Disappeared, the story of a man’s search for a missing woman, an elaborate reconstruction of a fleeting feminine force, a memory and essence.  And I’ll take the liberty of saying that perhaps this fruitless search for someone who meant something to a community or a loved one is an unresolved emotion still felt today as many family members, to this day, continue to still search for clues on what happened to the hundreds of students, intellectuals and advocates who were systematically disappeared, ie kidnapped, tortured and murdered after the 1964 military takeover.

Some Brazilian Portuguese words and cultural references presented some challenges, and I am immensely grateful to my friend and editor Matt Miller for our elaborate conversations over the context of certain words. Miller has a sophisticated eye for the dynamics and idiosyncrasies of Brazilian popular culture and is an avid collector of rare Brazilian music.

I must add that I have known Falcão for several decades and consider his work, his fierce intellectual independence and role as a public intellectual and skeptic a great source of inspiration in my life. He is, naturally, the product of the city of Recife, Brazil, which is known for its lively bars and bohemian nightlife; left-wing martyrs and sugar cane oligarchs; Dutch, Portuguese, and English invasions; warm westerly winds; peculiar and extraordinary literary output; and the exceptionally gifted in the world of the written word: Manuel Bandeira, Ariano Suassuna, and Clarice Lispector. 

I dedicate this book to the wild spirits of our port city.

Editor’s Note

Matt Miller

It has been a great honor and a pleasure to assist Helena Cavendish de Moura in preparing these stories by Lula Falcão for an English-speaking audience. While some aspects of his work speak specifically to the Brazilian context, the scenarios and characters in Vultures in the Living Room should also resonate with readers in other parts of our increasingly networked and alienated 21st century global society. In these stories, Lula meditates upon the surreal, repetitive, and absurdly self-delusional aspects of human experience, as we cling to archetypal narratives and idealized images to make sense of that which operates outside the bounds of rationality. With an