Industrial Park: A Proletarian Novel

By Patrícia Galvão

Book Overview

A member of Brazil's avant-garde in its heyday. Patr cia Galv o (or to use her nickname, Pagu) was extraordinary. Not only was her work among the most exciting and innovative published in the 1930s, it was unique in portraying an avant-garde woman's view of women in Sao Paulo during that audacious period. Industrial Park, first published in 1933, is Galv o's most notable literary achieve-ment. Like D blin's portrayal of Berlin in Alexanderplatz or Biely's St Petersburg, it is a book about the voices, clashes, and traffic of a city in the middle of rapid change. It includes fragments of public documents as well as dialogue and narration, giving a panorama of the city in a sequence of colorful slices. The novel dramatizes the problems of exploitation, poverty, racial prejudice, prostitution, state repression, and neocolonialism, but it is by no means a doctrinaire tract. Galv o's ironic wit pervades the novel, aspiring not only to describe the teeming city but also to put art and politics in each other's service. Like many of her contemporaries Galv o was a member of the Brazilian Communist Party. She attracted Party criticism for her unorthodox behavior and outspokenness. A visit to Moscow in 1934 disenchanted her with the communist state, but she continued to militate for change upon returning to Brazil. She was imprisoned and tortured under the Vargas dictatorship between 1935 and 1940. In the 1940s she returned to the public through her journalism and literary activities. She died in 1962.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803270410
• ISBN13: 9780803270411
• Release Date: December 1993
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

This book is humor, sex, and Communism.

Modernist child all-star Patricia Galvao wrote this book at age 22, reflecting her growing love of Marxism, understanding of the class struggle, and the first inklings of her distate of the traditional Communist party. Written in short vignettes that play like a silent movie, Industrial Park harshly portrays the reality of the early 20th century proletariat through the eyes and lives of working women. With a change of character and place names, the story could easily be set in any city of the world. I picked up this book and couldn't put it down. While at first it seemed overly serious, I slowly began to pick up on the wild hilarity of Pagu's observations. She was known for being flamboyant and was ultimately expelled from the Brazilian Communist Party for being overly-individualistic. Patricia Galvao, Pagu, was a sizzling pot of sauciness. This book will scald you.

It would have gotten 5 stars - if only it was longer!

Powerful. And shockingly modern, considering that it was written so long ago. Though the book is perhaps flawed by it's conceptualization of communism as the humanitarian solution for any and all of Brazil's many problems, it is not a rant, no tirade. All of Galvao's characters are immensely believable. It is easy to feel that oneself, even, is another of Galvao's characters. That's how cleverly she draws her readers in. Give this work a chance; it is of course unheard of (none of your friends will have read it) but that's just another of the work's many assets!