The Collector of Leftover Souls | Granta

  • Published: 07/11/2019
  • ISBN: 9781846276644
  • 135x20mm
  • 240 pages

The Collector of Leftover Souls

Eliane Brum

Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty

Welcome to the favela, welcome to the rainforest, welcome to the real Brazil.

This is the Brazil where a factory worker is loyal to his company for decades, only to find out that they knew the product he was making would eventually poison him. This is the Brazil where the mothers of the favela expect their sons to die as victims of the drug trade while still in their teens. This is the Brazil where the women initiated into the old Amazonian tradition of ‘baby-pulling’ deliver babies in their own time, far away from the drugs and scalpels of the modern hospital. In the company of award-winning journalist Eliane Brum, we meet the individuals struggling to stay afloat in a society riven by inequality and violence, and witness the resilience of spirit and commitment to life that makes Brazil one of the most complicated, most exhilarating places on earth.

With lyricism and heart, renowned journalist Eliane Brum draws us into the lives of everyday Brazilians and their stories, until we see not one Brazil but many, each filled with nuance, contradictions, color, beauty and life. Brum's empathic, unflinching reporting bears witness to her subjects' loves and losses, their seething anger and their extraordinary grace. Thanks to Brum, the forgotten are remembered, the voiceless have a storyteller, and the meek have inherited a vast and irreducible space in our collective imagination

Frances de Pontes Peebles, author of, The Air You Breathe

Eliane Brum makes her English debut with a profoundly challenging collection of portraits detailing the lives of those who are othered by mainstream Brazilian society and the dominant global order that feeds it. She asks us on every page to contemplate the privileged gaze-hers as well as our own-and to consider how it might be transformed into art and, ultimately, action

Francisco Cantú, author of, The Line Becomes a River

Good journalism consists of knowing how to choose what is relevant to tell, that which confronts us with our most important conflicts. But the compromise of great journalism goes further. It has to do with form, with finding the narrative voice, the point of view, and the tone to tell it. Eliane Brum has it all and is a unique voice that understands the Brazil of today

Juan Pablo Villalobos, author of, Quesadillas

The Author

Eliane Brum (born 1966) is a Brazilian journalist, writer and documentary film-maker. She writes regularly for El País and the Guardian and has won more than forty international awards for reporting, among them the Premio Rey de España and the Inter American Associated Press Award. She is the author of eight non-fiction books, including The Collector of Leftover Souls, as well as the novel One Two. She is also the director/co-director of three documentaries: Severina’s Story, Gretchen Filme Estrada and Laerte-Se. She lives in Brazil.

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The Translator

Diane Grosklaus Whitty is a translator of Brazilian Portuguese, specialized in the fields of the social sciences, history, and public health. Her major book translations include The Sanitation of Brazil by Gilberto Hochman, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross by Laura de Mello e Souza, and Zika: From the Brazilian Backlands to Global Threat by Debora Diniz. She has also translated prose and poetry by Adriana Lisboa, Marina Colasanti, and Mário Quintana, among others. Her translations have appeared in The Guardian, The Lancet, History Today, and Litro.

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Eliane Brum on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | Granta 157

From the Center of the World to the End of the World

Eliane Brum

‘For tourists to have this “experience”, six scientists were obliged to interrupt their research and wait until that afternoon, when the weather turned and time in the field shrank.’

Translated from the Portuguese by Diane Grosklaus Whitty.