The Taker and Other Stories

by Rubem Fonseca

Book Overview

Filled with violent, captivating stories about life in Rio, this is Fonseca's first collection to appear in English.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1948830701
• ISBN13: 9781948830706
• Release Date: August 2022
• Publisher: Open Letter
• Length: 166 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

carefree and cruel

From what little I understand about his works, Rubem Fonseca is a big deal in the literary world, especially representative of the best South American writers around today. It shows, after reading his new collection of short stories, The Taker and Other Stories. My initial impression is that his writing style is a close amalgam of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy, though with a uniqueness that combines among his characters a flippant whimsy with an emptiness of deviousness, desperateness, opportunism and cruelty. Make no mistake, Fonseca creates his stories around unique individuals and their circumstances, wealthy and impoverished; however, what distinguishes his stories and characters is that he is really writing about his native Brasil, about the desperate circumstances faced by its citizens, the corruption, their reaction to modernization, their daily sacrifices. As if one really needed to be told, Brasil is passion. Life there is both carefree and cruel. Fonseca heaps a mixture of both in this collection of stories. He interweaves a world full of overworked and psychotic businessmen, the feasting upon rural roadkill, the camaraderie between mugger and victim, the nature of family among poor armed robbers, of murder amid good intentions, and the intense burn yet fleeting demise of love, often with fatal consequences. Others have characterized Fonseca's stories as unsettling, with which I agree completely. Add to that the words deeply, disturbing, engrossing, stifling, existential,and human. His stories force one to think not only about Brasilian life and culture, but the state of humanity as well. They may be short stories, but they're so full of pathos.

Stories that are powerful and deeply unsettling

The Taker and Other Stories, by Brazilian author Rubem Fonseca, is a collection of short stories examining death in all its forms: murder, suicide, road kill (animal and human), medical emergencies, sickness, and old age. One protagonist laments, "Man is a solitary animal, an unhappy animal, and only death can fix us." This thought echoes throughout this collection. Fonseca approaches his morbid subject with precision and without a trace of sentimentality. Even the story about the death of a beloved dog, Betsy, is told with such macabre details that it's more likely to result in nausea than tears: "[The dog] exhaled nine identical sighs, her tongue hanging outside her mouth. Then she began to beat her stomach with her legs, as she would occasionally do, only more violently. Immediately afterward, she became immobile. The man ran his hand lightly over Betsy's body. She stretched and extended her limbs for the last time. She was dead. Now, the man knew, she was dead." Many of these stories feature first-person narrators that describe their brutal actions with a nonchalance that heightens the horror. In Night Drive, a businessman unwinds after a stressful day at the office by hitting pedestrians with his car: "She only realized I was going for her when she heard the sound of the tires hitting the curb. I caught her above the knees, right in the middle of her legs, a bit more toward the left leg--a perfect hit." Fonseca crafts each story with extreme care. In The Notebook, Fonseca sprinkles clichés throughout the beginning of the story. Indeed, the very premise of the story--a notebook in which the protagonist records the names of the women he has slept with--is a cliché. Just as the reader is about to dismiss the story as unoriginal, the protagonist admits his fondness for clichés ("I always have a good cliché up my sleeve"), and the dynamic changes. With Fonseca's writing, no detail is unnecessary, and no turn of phrase is unthinking. The Taker is powerful, deeply unsettling, and uniquely live in a way that only stories about death can be.