Description
Hecht had originally intended to write a biography of Verissimo. But with interviews ultimately spanning a decade, he couldn't ignore that much of what he had been told wasn't, strictly speaking, true. In Verissimo's recounting of her life, a sister who had never been born died tragically, while the very same rape that shattered the body and mind of an acquaintance occurred a second time, only with a different victim and several years later. At night, with the anthropologist's tape recorder in hand, she became her own ethnographer, inventing informants, interviewing herself, and answering in distinct voices.
With truth impossible to disentangle from invention, Hecht followed the lead of Verissimo, his would-be informant, creating characters, rendering a tale that didn't happen but that might have, probing at what it means to translate a life into words.
A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.
An ethnographic novel based on anthropologist Tobia Hecht's more than ten years of interviews with Bruna Verissimo, a youth from the hardscrabble streets of Recife, in northeast Brazil
About the Author
Tobias Hecht is a writer living in Claremont, California. His first book, At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil, won the 2002 Margaret Mead Award. Hecht is the editor of Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society and the translator of The Museum of Useless Efforts, by Cristina Peri Rossi. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University.
Reviews
"After Life is not only deeply moving, but written with profound integrity. It is saturated with compassion and in this lies its intense moral power."-Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces
"A disturbingly powerful journey into the violence of everyday life and the inner world of literature. The enigmatic and courageous characters of After Life jump off the page and change the ways we think about human agency today."-Joao Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
"After Life engages a startling mix of ethnography and fiction to illuminate both the world of Recife's homeless and the peculiar ennui that often befalls the anthropologist during extended fieldwork. . . . Remarkable. . . . After Life urges us to consider, more deeply than we have before, alternative modes of representation." -- Robin E. Sheriff * Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *
"A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht." * Adolescence *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822337881
Author Tobias Hecht
Format Paperback
Page Count 192
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 286g
