Rubem Fonseca

Rubem Fonseca (born May 11, 1925, Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil—died April 15, 2020, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian short-story and novel writer known best for his gritty crime fiction that shed light on urban life in Brazil.

Fonseca became a police officer in 1952 in the suburbs just outside Rio de Janeiro, for which he wrote regular crime-scene reports. His exposure to the grisly details of those crimes influenced the fiction he soon began to write. He spent 1953–54 studying business administration in the United States at New York University. After returning to Brazil, he maintained his position with the police department through 1958. He turned to writing fiction in the early 1960s and published his first book of short stories—Os prisioneiros (“The Prisoners”)—in 1963. That book exposed the dangerous underbelly of Rio, a subject as yet not handled by Brazil’s fiction writers. O prisioneiros was well received and was followed by A coleira do cão (“The Dog’s Collar”), a second collection of short stories published in 1965. Many of the characters and plots of his stories emerged from his work as a police officer as well as from the news headlines, which by the mid-1960s focused on the new military dictatorship that had taken over Brazil in 1964. Fonseca wrote his first novel in 1973, O casa Morel (“The Morel Case”), a work of crime fiction that includes explicit descriptions of sex and brutal violence. It was for that type of content that the Brazilian government scrutinized and then censored his writings, including Feliz ano novo (1975; “Happy New Year”), a book of short stories that, incidentally, also catapulted his career.

Fonseca created some characters that appear throughout his works, such as the lawyer-detective named Mandrake. Fonseca’s most-anthologized work is the short story “Mandrake,” from his collection of stories titled O cobrador (1979; “The Collector”). Mandrake appeared again in the murder mystery A grande arte (1983; High Art), in which he gets involved in a perilous investigation of a prostitute’s murder. Fonseca also wrote the screenplay of the book for a feature film released in North America in 1991 bearing the title Exposure. His detective novel Bufo & Spallanzani (1985) was also adapted to film, with a screenplay written by Fonseca; it was released in 2001.

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Two books of note by Fonseca published in the 1990s take history as their subject matter rather than the contemporary moment. Agosto (1990; “August”), usually considered his best-known work, tells the story leading up to the 1954 suicide of Getúlio Vargas, the former two-time president of Brazil. O selvagem da ópera (1994; “The Savage of the Opera”) takes 19th-century Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Gomes as its main character. Fonseca continued to publish both novels and collections of short stories into the 21st century, at which point only a selection of his works had been translated from Spanish or Portuguese into English.

Fonseca received many awards in Brazil for his work, as well as the Luís de Camões Prize for Literature, a prize awarded annually for literature written in Portuguese (and named after Portugal’s most important poet), and the Juan Rulfo Literature Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature (now called the FIL Literature Award in Romance Languages), awarded by the University of Guadalajara for lifetime achievement in any literary genre (both in 2003).