ALMINO, João. Ideias para onde passar o fim do mundo. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987.
Bianca Magela Melo
Illustrated by Bia Wouk
Translated by Annika Prickett
The city of Brasília is the setting for Ideias para onde passar o fim do mundo (Ideas on Where to Spend the End of the World), the first novel by João Almino (Mossoró, RN, 1950), just as it would be for his later novels. Almino, born in Rio Grande do Norte, spent much of his life in the federal capital. However, this is a displaced and unusual Brasília. At the time of its release in 1987, the country was breathing the air of promise after two decades of dictatorship. While outside the fictional realm, all eyes were on the capital and the government of José Sarney, João Almino’s book inserts into national politics the first elected Black president, Paulo Antônio. The story begins with a photo taken on the day of this president’s inauguration, shot by the photographer Cadu, whose later narration reveals his intimate involvement with some of the people in the photograph.
In the novel, the world is destined to end in Brasília. The city’s structural and human architecture cannot last, predicts the medium and clairvoyant Íris, who brings a touch of mysticism to the plot. The narrator, on the other hand, dedicates the book to the rats, believing in the survival of immense specimens and the dry plants of the Planalto Central, Brazil’s highlands. His stance toward the city is laced with irony, as in the moments when he jokes about Brasília playing the role of the capital of the so-called country of the future: “spaces made for cars and giant men” or “for extraterrestrial beings and spaceships.”
Íris, who maintains contact with occupants of a flying saucer and perceives an impending catastrophe in the country’s political center of power, is the adviser to First Lady Madalena. After escaping from a hospital following a spiritual (or delusional) journey, Íris encounters an agitated crowd attending a rally by the president, who, some time later, during Carnival, would be kidnapped. This scene of the crowd reappears in the narrative through the perspectives of different characters.
In the “About the Author” section of the book, João Almino is described as an “unrealistic post-romantic who finds reality unacceptable.” The essayist, diplomat, and political science professor, now an award-winning novelist, claims to have spent 16 years, through moves and pauses, finishing his first novel, one of eight he has published. The term “hybrid,” often used to describe contemporary narratives, applies to this book written 36 years ago: it blends modes (realistic and fantastic) and genres (photography, cinema, literature), as well as a playful narrative structure with a ghost-narrator whose word is cast into doubt by a surprising twist in the final part of the novel.
Indeed, the narrator is the spirit of a dead man who “mounts” the characters, using them as mediums — in the spiritual sense of being possessed by a spirit. This directly references Machado de Assis’s novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, with the choice to narrate not himself, but others: “Dead, I pay homage to old Machado. I don’t care whether I begin at the beginning or the end. I don’t want to narrate my death. My name is not Brás Cubas.” The high degree of metafiction in the text owes much to the narrator’s explanations of a supposed film script he is writing. His choices, doubts, proposals for beginnings, preferences, and ideas are presented to the reader. “You are wrong to think that Eva’s story could be summed up in a single chapter”; or “Forgive me, but I prefer a beginning like a little fairy tale: once upon a time, there were leptons and soon protons and neutrons.” This conversation, perhaps another alignment with Machado de Assis, can feel excessive to contemporary readers at certain moments.
In schematic terms, the plot details the idea for a movie, based on two supposedly historical events: the election of the country’s first Black president and a popular uprising in the streets of Brasília. The narrative also focuses on the intertwined paths of the people in the photograph, but the most detailed characters are a trio of women: in addition to the clairvoyant Íris, there is Berenice, a Northeastern migrant and domestic worker in Brasília, who is a victim of the era’s machismo, and Eva, the president’s sister, a depressive figure who suffers for love. João Almino stated, in a 2011 speech during one of the award ceremonies for his novel Cidade Livre, that the essence of his literary creation lies in the experience of language itself: “Even if there were no plot, my goal would be for the text to stand on the choice of words alone, one joining another in unexpected ways, avoiding clichés.” He emphasizes that words create “new forms of expression and wide spaces for the imagination.”
In Ideias para onde passar o fim do mundo, the narratives about characters and events are quick and overlapping, not firmly grounded in individual character development. The ghost-narrator lives through each character in turn, and it is his movement that drives the narrative, shifting the perspective of observation. Even with Íris, Berenice, and Eva, the nuance is more existential than psychological, with the narrator constantly highlighting his own presence and viewpoint. In some moments when the spotlight is on the three women, separately, poetic prose predominates, as in the passage: “Then I also gradually discovered that she [Berenice] lived in a world that ended in a wall”; or this about Íris, “Sometimes you have to go to the end of the intensity you have inside you — that’s what she thought — otherwise it feels as if you’re dying. So she had to run away, just as she once fled her parents’ house.”
The photo that originated the narrative was shown to the narrator by his wife Silvinha. The image stands out because it contrasts with the current global climate — a “harbinger of great wars.” The composition, featuring happy people celebrating, is an exception and shows a romantic side of the population, who imagined that “this time their dream might be possible with the election of Paulo Antônio.” It was a dream that carried “the utopia of complete disdain for power.” However, after the president’s kidnapping, there is a sense that opposing forces began fierce clashes — the fragile sustainability of the federal government becoming another metaphor for the end of the world.
Had the book been written by a Black author, the character of President Paulo Antônio might have received a more representative portrayal. Introduced as the first Black president in the country’s history and as the “adopted son of a general,” his presence in the narrative is minimal. The ghost-narrator himself appears more frequently, in his shifts and in his relationship with Silvinha, who is Madalena’s daughter. The election of a Black president in a country deeply marked by racial issues would, in another context, likely be more deeply explored. The prejudice against the president is made explicit, but diffusely, as in the statements of Berenice’s boyfriend, Zé Maria, who is involved in opposition movements: “And Zé Maria, himself kind of dark-skinned, had once told her, Berenice, that Paulo Antônio was a Black man trying to pass as white — but to this day she didn’t know what that meant.”
As the novel is structured, the issue of racial prejudice is not at the center of the narrative and does not receive much attention as a theme. Indeed, João Almino’s fiction does not build itself around a single focal point. Today, the book can be read for its narrative invention, as a portrait of an era and an artist, and as the beginning of Almino’s fictional relationship with the city of Brasília — a source of fascination and a laboratory of invention for him throughout his life. A place “without a past, without tradition, where truths were freely constructed,” as the narrator of Ideias para onde passar o fim do mundo affirms. This city, which has been the stage for so many chapters in our political history, also witnessed the emergence of mystical sects and end-of-the-world prophecies, tied to its very birth and occupation.
Further Reading
BULCÃO, Armando (1987). O Brasil com um presidente negro, civil e popular. Correio Braziliense, Aparte, domingo, 8 de nov.
COELHO, Ana Carolina Canuto (2021). Brasília: espaço, patrimônio e narrativas nas obras de João Almino.Tese (Doutorado em Arquitetura e Urbanismo) – Universidade de Brasília, Brasília. Disponível em: https://repositorio.unb.br/handle/10482/43027. Acesso em: 12 ago. 2023.
FISCHER, Almeida (1988). Ficção. Recensão crítica. João Almino, Ideias para onde passar o fim do mundo. Colóquio Letras, Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, n. 102, p. 134-135.
LAFETÁ, João Luiz (2004). Entre a fotografia e o romance. In: A dimensão da noite e outros ensaios. São Paulo: Duas Cidades; Editora 34. p. 522-524.
Iconography
