An Emerald for Iamanja

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta,
co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of
Canada, 1880-1914, and co-editor of The Collected Works of E.J. Pratt.

The words “Rio de Janeiro” and “Copacabana” will conjure up for
many people visions of luxury, wealthy decadence, and sexual
extravagance—none far from the truth. There is, however, another
world—until recently unrecognized—intermingled with and adjacent to
the one so often depicted in the movies and in romantic fiction. It is a
Rio of poverty, crime, prostitution, and utter degradation—one with
“seven hundred thousand homeless street urchins looking in on the
forbidden, unobtainable, dazzingly beautiful life on the other side of
Copacabana.” This is the world so brilliantly evoked in Jacot’s
novel.

Focusing on two of the street urchins, Jacot not only vivifies the
misery of the Baixada Fluminense, the political corruption, the police
brutality, and the moral hopelessness of the poor, but offers glimpses
of human love struggling to survive against great odds. I say Jacot
“vivifies” because his is not a sociological novel; it is not
“heavy” with jargon, authorial interpolation, or comment. Jacot, as
a good novelist should, makes us “see, and hear, and feel” the
bittersweet existence of his two protagonists. And he does so with humor
and compassion in a story that is economically told.

My only slight criticism is that there seem to be two novels here: one
of life in Rio and another—a marvelous picaresque worthy of Cervantes
himself—that sets Paulo and Bippo on a non-heroic quest that ends, as
indeed this whole book does, where it begins. This is, however, a minor
discontent, and perhaps only represents my wish that there were indeed
two novels to read.