With attention to the social and political weight of the everyday, Abreu’s disillusioned bohemians pepper Moldy Strawberries with existential questions about the meaning of friendship and the contradictory nature of love ... a polyvocal, cultural, and literary hybridity that speaks to its national and global context as it does to the author’s intimate feelings ... Abreu attends to those gestures of loving amid a sinister world, how they gleam among the detritus of, as Wojnarowicz put it, the pre-invented world ... Weighing down humor and the surreal with the concrete realities of living with illness, Moldy Strawberries forces the tradition of social satire to bulge at the seams. It’s a collection that is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, vaulting existential questions across the page while poking fun at the urge to ask them in the first place, both yearning for and laughing at utopian visions of the past. The strawberry fields of the 1960s and ’70s have grown moldy, but, in Abreu’s writing, within the mulch lies the promise of the new, a chance to start again.
... exuberant ... These eighteen stories are intimate, focusing on internal examinations of personal sacrifices and desires, desperate struggles to connect and survive, and honest moments between two people. They distill flashes of joy, despair, and lust into crystalline moments of flickering emotion. Long, vibrant sentences and powerful imagery ground their feelings ... This collection amplifies the lives of people who were often disregarded or dismissed by a Brazilian society in flux. Its stories vibrate with emotion and honesty, conveyed through distinct voices and strong imagery by a confident and deft writer.
... tenderly translated ... a collection of short prose pieces and stories that brims with life even as its flesh bruises ... Published in 1982, its vivid depictions of queer communities amidst the perils of the military dictatorship, rising homophobia, and the looming AIDS crisis serve to affirm life even when the threat of death feels ever-present. In eighteen prose pieces, which range from dialogues and vignettes to fully developed stories, Abreu’s writing bears witness to humanity in all its fragile glory. His prose affirms the possibility of love, desire, and connection—or at least indulges that dream ... Abreu’s style is reason enough to pick up the collection. Tales are often told in a breathless manner, but the narrative will at times pause abruptly, as if the narrator needs to catch their breath after this dizzying display of emotion. Dantas Lobato matches Abreu’s pace with care, infusing the stories with an incredible affective power that lingers long after the book ends ... Abreu collages together an abundance of references, which has the effect of immersing the reader in the text. It is as if we ourselves are tangled in this messy relationship between two lovers who have lost the spark of eroticism while they go on a whistle-stop tour of the world, until Abreu brings us to a screeching halt in an unidentified city ... Even when employing a third-person narrator, the stories feel intimate and personal ... Some of the most poignant moments in the collection come from tales where our protagonists are lonely, perhaps even vulnerable, but where human connection allows genuine love and tenderness to bloom ... without a doubt a sensory experience, with rich descriptions and references throughout the text. As well as the recommendations for music to accompany the reader’s experience, the narratives often hinge upon songs, lyrical motifs, or refrains that enrich the meaning of the text. Abreu mentions songs in English, Spanish, and Portuguese to create a multilingual soundscape, which understandably poses challenges for the translation. Dantas Lobato’s response is to create a multilingualism of her own, where the English text is peppered with words or phrases that maintain the cosmopolitan world that Abreu conjures up ... Reading Moldy Strawberries feels like immersing yourself underwater, in a beautiful world full of vivid colors and unfamiliar textures. While the current could drag you under–for danger and sadness are ever-present, the foil to vibrant love and desire–you surface feeling profoundly changed by your experiences. Abreu’s work bears witness to the beauty and cruelty of humanity, and in Dantas Lobato’s translation, they offer access to a dazzling literary experience that should not be missed.
Abreu’s roving eye diverts and directs the reader toward secret knowledge and emotional revelation ... Abreu’s stories lie somewhere between fables with wry moral lessons and diary entries full of emotional impasses. Often, his detached prose serves as protection for unconscious or coded desires ... Elsewhere, Abreu uses the language of distraction to excavate characters’ complicated memories ... By telescoping from the lips of a man to the inside of a cut fig, Abreu redirects the reader’s eye, allowing erotic desire an interval of privacy in which to blossom. Here, beauty, violence, and eros form a conceptual triangle—one defers to another, until each is deeply felt but never punctured by a direct, analytic gaze ... That Moldy Strawberries can embody the ambivalence of pleasant despair is a testament to its characters’ complexity, their ability to simultaneously navigate multiple lines of thought—some trivial, others profound—and multiple versions of the self—some public and performative, others private or reserved for a kindred spirit. To witness their distracted impulses, their tendencies to veer from one thought or self to another, is to witness these characters’ humanity.
... rapturous ... a portrait of queer life in which it’s impossible to divorce pleasure from politics. Abreu attests to the fraught ties between friends and lovers in Brazil’s cities of the time, and his tendencies toward formal excess—jagged, labyrinthine sentences that vault across different registers; innumerable and unabashed appearances of liquid waste (piss, semen, sweat, glitter, cognac, mud, rainwater, blood); a story consisting solely of dialogue between two friends, accompanied by instructions that it be read ad infinitum—also reflect his defiance of the political autocracy that censored his work and eventually sent him into exile ... The musical dissonance here leaks beautifully into the prose, and Dantas Lobato’s translation moves with lightning speed as Abreu’s characters go out in the rain, drink with abandon, reach across the dance floor, and gaze at the planets and at one another. Abreu hammers away at the core of life until it’s chiseled and brilliant, until it splinters, suddenly, into language.
Overall, the narratives are examples of their time. Deeply urban, they’re representative of a shift in Brazilian literature that would, in its contemporary production, choose metropolitan cities as its main stage. An existentialist dread runs throughout the narratives as they are marked by an exploration of the self, expressing the fears of a generation facing incredible challenges ... those elements that seem cliché — the young, insecure gay man who is berated, and later seduced, by an older, masculine, dominant military figure — serve to ridicule those in power. This is a way of removing the militaryfrom its moral pedestal ... Many of the other stories in Moldy Strawberries work in this key, touching both on the questions of homosexuality and the dictatorship. Consequently, they give insight into Brazil in the latter half of the 20th century.
The experience of reading the collection at times feels like strolling through a graveyard ... This memorializing casts a shadow over the stories at the outset — it is hard not to imagine that what we are about to witness is a glimpse into a real life that, if not cut short, was haunted by frustrated desire, the threat of violence, or isolation. The same is true of the stories that are not explicitly in honor of the dead. These too bear dedications, likely for living friends. The effect is no less somber: even when the stories veer into allegory or abstraction, they never lose the sense of being biographical accounts of people locked in a bitter, losing battle with a society that does not want them ... His writing has a unique set of concerns: how to exist in a perpetual, unstable present; how to make sense of the confusion produced when a mind cannot look forward, only backward — or perhaps worse, inward. For the most part, these are concerns Abreu confronts narratively. Elsewhere, however, he employs both formal and stylistic experimentation that, for many readers, might feel less effective, or perhaps overly obtuse ... he difficulty in reading through some of these intertwined, frantic identities is not unlike the challenge of parsing a single, clear image from the blur of several superimposed photographs ... Even in the book’s more optimistic stories, Abreu is always bittersweet, never saccharine.
The collection explores many of Abreu’s most important themes, from the Aids epidemic in Brazil to the stifling dictatorship. His writing is at times delirious, arresting and revolutionary, often using fragmentation and the language of dreams to describe the world around him ... Among the most beautiful and highly political stories is Fat Tuesday ... This luminous collection of stories shows him to be one of the most compelling writers of the continent at times of oppression.
... surprising and provocative ... vivid translation ... Abreu’s prose shimmers and always surprises—each story is a small, bright gem. The fearless writing in this beautiful collection deserves a vast English-language readership.
A stark collection of short stories from a Brazilian writer who creates specks of beauty with every stroke of the pen ... Known for his often dizzying syntax and provocative imagery, Abreu writes with an ease that sticks and with an intention that triggers ... Abreu remarkably captures a feeling that escapes definition, a proximity to death so palpable that the words scream its song. Abreu’s prose is still, rich, and full of time lost and time future ... A profoundly moving collection on surviving stillness.
... let’s be honest about what it is: the late juvenilia of an aging queer bohemian ... wallows in this generational self-pity and self-regard, with mixed results. Middle-age weltschmerz from a gay writer risking the censors of Brazil’s military dictatorship is not an entirely unattractive proposition, and several stories in the collection transcend cliché to achieve enchantment through the sheer force of artistic will triumphing over depressive malaise and cannabinoid ennui. Others exalt moments of joy that manage to persist under an oppressively homophobic regime ... Here Abreu’s prose pulses with life and gamely flirts with camp ... This dreary solipsism saturates several stories in the collection ... Still Life reads like a timed response to a creative writing prompt ... Less interested in capturing a mood than in generating a vibe, the narrative gaze is here directed outward; like an adolescent, it doesn’t register what it sees as a historical or geographical particularity. Rather, the vague city is a universal, made recognizable—and even familiar—by viewing it from the vantage of restless youth. This means it’s a cliché, but like most optical illusions, it’s amusing to behold ... [Abreau] became, and remains, the kind of cult figure who stirs the passions of aspiring young writers because even his more jejune and navel-gazing stories capture a different sort of magic, one that comes disguised in blessings and curses: the extreme and erratic emotions of youth.
