LITERATURE: On the Impossibility of Narrating

Award-winning writer Luiz Ruffato, who was the Distinguished Brazilian Writer in Residence at UC Berkeley in spring 2012, on writing about the sprawling megalopolis of São Paulo.

I’m from Brazil, a third-world country on the edge of capitalism, a nation rooted in violence:

violence against Indians, decimated in the early days of discovery;

violence against blacks, enslaved and exiled forever;

violence against poor Europeans and Japanese, who landed there, always an ocean away from their ancestors;

violence against those from the Northeast and Minas Gerais, cheap labor segregated into tenements and slums.