Read Your Way Through São Paulo

Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books.

The fifth largest city in the world, São Paulo is not only the richest urban center in Brazil: It is a rhizome fed by conflicting moral, ethical and aesthetic ambitions and imaginations, which lead and influence an entire country’s cultural production.

Absorbing, concentrating, dominating and replicating other collective imaginations in an ongoing colonizing project, today São Paulo is, for better or worse, the place where many decisions are made about what Brazilian cultural identity and Brazilian culture are understood to be. This causes an important number of artists from all over Brazil to migrate here. Among them are writers — including the young Black and Indigenous writers whose fictional narratives are, increasingly, and in ways not yet fully understood, opposing this colonizing project in ambitious ways, with language and characters that would have been unacceptable a few years ago.

São Paulo is a daunting metropolis. What are some books that can help me approach the city?

Conceição Evaristo’s powerful first novel, “Ponciá Vicencio,” translated by Paloma Martinez-Cruz, addresses the emotional impact of structural racism on Black Brazilian people. The eponymous main character, Ponciá, grows up in a small town, Vila Vicêncio, in a Black family working on a small subsistence farm. Her grandfather had been enslaved. Facing racism, Ponciá takes a train to the big city to find a new life. The name of the city is not mentioned, but there is no doubt it is São Paulo.

The São Paulo explored in the literature of the 21st century, as in Evaristo’s novel, is a space in which extreme situations unfold under a regime of oppression directed against those who are outside privileged social groups. This, in a dystopian way, is very well addressed by the writer Ignácio de Loyola Brandão in his novel “And Still the Earth,” in a translation by Ellen Watson. In this work of speculative fiction, set in a future São Paulo, “the System” governs its subjects’ every movement and thought.

Another important author for understanding São Paulo, and Brazil, is Carolina Maria de Jesus. Among her books, “Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus,” in a translation by David St. Clair, stands out. De Jesus was a contemporary of the world-renowned novelist Clarice Lispector, whose works capture that other important Brazilian city, Rio de Janeiro. There is an interesting dialectic between these two great writers that reveals Brazilian subjectivities.

The city is known for its bookstores. What are some of your favorites?

While it may not have the natural beauty of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo is a metropolis where encounters, conviviality and affection are fostered by its parks, theaters, museums, cultural spaces, cinemas, restaurants and bookstores. I cannot imagine São Paulo without the charm of its bookshops.