Brotherly love

the brothers by milton hatoum(blooomsbury, (pounds) 15.99)

BRAZILIAN-LEBANESE novelist Milton Hatoum begins his second novel with a quotation from a poem by a countryman, modernist writer Carlos Drummond de Andrade. It's a prophetic epigraph given what's to come and tells of a house "sold with all its memories/all its furniture all its nightmares/all the sins committed".

Of course sin and nightmares are the province of humans, so while the house in Hatoum's tale frames the events, it's the actions and emotions of the people under its roof which leave such an imprint on the otherwise blameless bricks and mortar.

The Brothers is the story of twins, Yaqub and Omar, born to Brazilian-Lebanese couple Halim and Zana in 1927 in Manaus, a city on the banks of the River Negro in Brazil's lawless Amazonian heartland. Zana dotes on the twins, favouring Omar over Yaqub, while Halim resents their intrusion into the life he has struggled to forge with his wife.

There are other players too: Rania, a beautiful younger sister who idolises the brothers; Domingas, the enigmatic Indian maid; and Domingas's bastard son Nael, a shadowy narrator who pieces the story together through a combination of eyewitness reports and recollections cadged or cajoled from the main participants. We don't even learn his name until the drama is nearly played out and only in throw-away comments does he reveal who he is and how he fits into the family's life.

Driving Nael's narrative is the desire to find his father. Hatoum brings Nael only slowly out of the murk so we progress at a snail's pace towards the inevitable candidates. But which one of the twins is it? Omar, the waster and ladies' man, or Yaqub, the introverted engineer who flees Manaus for the bright lights of Sao Paolo and a life building hotels for the cocktail crowd? The facts, when they are presented, clarify nothing.

Nael apart, the story is best viewed as a set of triangular relationships between the twins and the other women in the house. Dividing the brothers, meanwhile, is a feud, nominally over a neighbourhood girl but really fuelled by these other relationships, primarily the one with - you guessed it - their mother. When Yaqub is sent back to the Lebanon to see out the war years, the seeds are sown for a hatred which grows incrementally as the years progress.

Milton Hatoum is himself a resident of Manaus, now a city of one and a half million people, and a professor of literature at the Federal University of Amazonas. Fittingly, given the Drummond de Andrade quotation, he studied architecture at Sao Paulo University and has had stints at the University of California (Berkeley) and the Sorbonne.

Given his local knowledge, the terrain he presents is blurry and indistinct. His descriptions of Manaus are a series of close-ups and pan-shots; where he does attempt to map the city, the outline refuses to stay fixed in the reader's head. Even the house itself sprawls, seems to have no distinct boundaries. That at least suits his narrative technique which jumps backwards and forwards as a conversation would between old friends who don't require background explanations but do enjoy regular digressions. So the chronology becomes compressed or confused, tethered only by the event which opens and closes the novel - Zana's death. Other characters can die one day only to be resurrected the next to relate a conversation which happened years earlier.

With Manaus the focus, Yaqub's departure for Sao Paulo effectively removes him from the story so the big questions - what drives him, what happened to him in the Lebanon, what is the nature of his relationship with Domingas - are never answered. Even Omar, closer to home, is viewed from a distance. So much in Hatoum's novel remains maddeningly unresolved, even the hints of incest between Rania and the twins, the suggestion of a rape elsewhere and Zana's unmotherly - at least to these western eyes - affection for Omar.

The Brothers has won Brazil's top prize for literature, as did Hatoum's debut, The Tree Of The Seventh Heaven. But by keeping so many characters in shadow, by letting them live (and die) with so many important things unsaid, he ransoms the power of his story for the small-change of stylistic achievement.

Copyright 2002
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