Review by Roberto de Sousa Causo   —   October 08, 1999

The interest of North-American authors for Brazil may also come out of their understanding of differences as much as similarities, between both countries. Brazil is an America of Latino origin, while the U.S. is an America of Anglo origin. One is mostly Catholic, the other mostly Protestant. Different ways of thinking, for sure. Brazil has opposite strategies concerning racial and social struggle. Perhaps Brazil is to the U.S. a potential speculative mirror, a land of the "Other" that can tell something about the "Self."

Along with Card and Yamashita, Patricia Anthony has lived in Brazil for some years and considers it as a "second homeland." She came to Brazil to teach English in 1970 and said, in a 1994 Locus interview: "I totally adapted. I loved the country, and I wanted to become a Brazilian citizen." With Cradle of Splendor Anthony hits the bulls-eye in using her second country as a mirror for American perceptions, yet more than that, she may have produced Brazilian science fiction indeed.

In a near future, Brazil becomes a world power thanks to the control of a brand new anti-gravity technology that seems to come from alien intelligence's directions channeled through the Brazilian medium Freitas and executed by dictator Ana Maria Bonfim. Of course, the U.S. can't let this be--it wants the technology, and that ultimately leads to war between the two countries. The plot is a convoluted chain of espionage-movements and state-decisions, with characters from all over--Japan, Germany, Russia, the U.S.--coming and going with frenetic energy and dramatic clashes. Yet, for the most part, Anthony holds back any violent action. Characters constantly feel threatened by eminent death, but it never happens until the last 80 pages or so, when death and horror become major factors. However, Anthony avoids the usual genre fiction action-climaxes, full of fighting and gunplay, which ends with death. She also avoids the election of a vicarious hero--the good guy who is easy for the reader to identify with--from her cast of troubled characters. And when a character dies, he or she also dies in unexpected ways.

I'm inclined to call Cradle of Splendor a tupinipunk (Brazilian cyberpunk) novel, as I've done elsewhere with Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. It is about a Third World country with a new role in a world order marked by global communication (each chapter in Anthony's book is epigraphed by a "transcription" of TV newscasts and shows), and cultural confrontation. The science in it is never expressed in the hard terms of American cyberpunk, but it is clearly referenced. Characters are not fully accomplished. In fact, they are quite superficial in the way that they "wear" their feelings and traumas in quite explicit and visceral ways, with not much characterization. Sex urges and violence burst out from them in unexpected moments. They are shaken in their convictions and their beliefs are reshaped and challenged by the Brazilian culture--Dolores, the American painter and CIA undercover agent is distressed by the way that Brazil has grown "wild inside her," like an infection (an image also present in Kadrey's cyberpunk Kamikaze L'Amour). Syncretism is expressed here, and syncretism (the fusion of different cultural features in a single amalgam) is a major tupinipunk feature and concern, as a local response to globalism and multiculturalism, in a mystic, unscientific country.

The violent abuse of women and children is another major element in the book. Every female character seems to hid a past of abuse, and some male characters, such as Edson Carvalho, the secret-police boss, and CIA agent McNatt, are drawn towards abusive behavior. Freitas, of course, may be described as an abuser of cosmic proportions, the sole responsible for the state of affairs that leads Brazil to be invaded by American troops, and for the "disappearing" of civilian people. He is a spirit-doctor in the line of Zé Arigó, who performed surgeries without regular-surgical instruments or methods, "guided" by ghost doctors. But he seems devoid of empathy or compassion. He is an empty soul and Anthony suggest he probes his inner "emptiness-hunger" and extracts from this spiritual abyss the technological secrets he hatches for Ana Maria, on the expenses of the missing people's lives or free will. This exercise in the philosophy of violence is disturbing, and clearly that is what Anthony aims for.

The feminist content is either a key to the symbolic interpretation of the novel, or an intrusive subtext. The characters, in a very post-modern way, lack the contradictory depth we should expect from someone who is clearly the most important woman in Brazil's history, or an institutionalized killer, or a sexually-abused little child, a sensitive painter divided between her love of America and her love of Brazil, her love of man and her love of women, and the cosmic-monster, even though Anthony makes his monstrosity look so painfully human. The reader feels they are not apt for the roles the author has assigned them. The novel would have been very much enriched if these characters could build a vicarious bridge between the author's symbols and the reader's sympathies.

The narrative pace is not as tight, though elegant, as usual in American fiction, but strangely relaxed, drifting into surrealistic detours. It doesn't obey much of plot rules for cause and effect. Everything may happen under the tropical sun. This is what the anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss has called "Tristes Trópicos," the sad tropics, in which the strongest feelings of passion or compassion may be, in the following second, turned into the most terrifying violence and tragedy. In the circumstances described in Cradle of Splendor, the tristes trópicos also engulfs the United States and the world that will be after the turn of the century.

Anthony's novel even reads like Brazilian novels of political and satirical content that were fashionable in the '70s, and Anthony employs a number of cultural items such as Afro-Brazilian cults, wide-spread channeling, the memory of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1984), the people's irreverence, and even the realization that Natalie Wood (compared to a character) had a "Brazilian face" and that in Brazil buttocks are the female feature more appreciated, contrary tothe American fetish of breasts, giving local color to the story. Keeping with a Latin-American point of view, the novel harbours some Latino feelings of anti-americanism--in the sense of the U.S. interventionism and military muscle-flexing that has left such a strong and negative mark among Latin-Americans all over the continent.