Vidigal
The Grass Is Always Browner
There is a particular kind of escape that fiction loves: the flight from a grey, suffocating homeland into the technicolour chaos of the Global South. The unnamed narrator of Vidigal - a Belarusian remote worker and aspiring musician - makes this leap. Fleeing pandemic lockdowns, "windowsill alcoholics," and what he calls "post-Soviet melancholy," he lands in Brazil. But this is no Eat, Pray, Love. From the first night, sleeping near the crime-ridden Luz station ("the very bottom of S o Paulo"), the novel announces itself as a cold plunge, not a warm bath.
The author, writing from viscerally close range, delivers a picaresque that is also an autopsy of modern poverty tourism. Our hero couchsurfs with Trotskyite students, hitchhikes with Bible-thumping truckers and predatory fitness trainers, and eventually washes up in the favela of Vidigal, perched above Ipanema. Here, a "room with a view" means a concrete box where the electricity fails every afternoon, the neighbour cleans his rifle on the stoop, and the howl of funk music is punctuated only by the screech of pet monkeys.
What makes Vidigal remarkable is its refusal of sentimentality. The narrator is no noble savage learning from the poor; he is a thin, broke, increasingly bitter drifter. When he falls into bed with women - out of pity, boredom, or mutual calculation - the encounters are never romantic. They are forensic examinations of class. An Afro-Brazilian nurse treats him with tenderness, but the narrator cannot return her love; a wealthy white American on antidepressants pays for five-star hotels and road trips to Igua u, yet he resents her for it. "How disgusting it is to be financially dependent," he writes. "And even worse... dependent on playing at romance."
The novel's true antagonist is not violence or poverty, but the narrator's own romanticism. He flees Belarus only to discover that favela life is not "freedom from vulgar capitalism" but its rawest form - where a child sells weed for twenty reais and the landlord, once friendly, begins to calculate every square metre. After a bout of dengue fever, a police raid, and a psychedelic mushroom trip that brings him to tears, he does the only logical thing: he goes home.
To a wooden house in a Belarusian village. Under the stars. With dogs barking in the distance.
Vidigal is a bitter ode to failure. It will frustrate those seeking a redemption arc and reward readers who believe that sometimes, the hardest-won truth is that home is not the place you find, but the place you stop running from. The prose is jagged, unadorned, and brilliantly alive - a fever dream for an age of false exits.
Bottom line: A gritty, unsparing, and perversely beautiful meditation on privilege, place, and the illusion of starting over. Just don't pack your sunscreen.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
