Brazil

Brazil (1963) by Elizabeth Bishop – The Sunday Times
ISBN: None
Condition: Good

Brazil, 1963. Vast forests, enormous rivers, rapidly growing cities, coffee plantations, beaches, modernist architecture, samba, football and approximately enough land to make most European countries look like administrative districts.

Written by the celebrated American poet Elizabeth Bishop, who lived in Brazil for many years, this is a wonderfully evocative portrait of the country at a particularly interesting moment in its modern history.

And Brazil does not lend itself particularly well to brief explanation.

It is enormous.

Properly enormous.

The sort of enormous where looking at a map and saying “that’s not far” can lead to several days of travel and a serious reconsideration of scale.

The country stretches across a huge portion of South America and contains almost every sort of landscape one could reasonably request: tropical rainforest, enormous river systems, mountains, grasslands, wetlands, agricultural regions, sprawling cities and a coastline of such unreasonable length that Britain begins to resemble somewhere one might walk around after lunch.

In 1963, Brazil was also changing rapidly.

The country was industrialising.

Cities were expanding.

Roads were being driven into previously remote regions.

Migration was transforming urban life.

And Brasília—the extraordinary new capital built almost from scratch in the country’s interior—had opened only three years earlier, in 1960.

Few governments demonstrate confidence quite like deciding the existing capital is inconvenient and constructing another one.

Brasília was the great symbol of modern Brazilian ambition.

Designed around the plans of Lúcio Costa, with monumental buildings by Oscar Niemeyer, it looked less like a traditional city than somebody’s architectural proposal for the future.

Curving concrete.

Huge open spaces.

Government buildings apparently designed with the assumption that everyone approaching them should feel very small.

It was modernism conducted on a national scale.

The future had arrived.

Naturally, it was made of concrete.

Rio de Janeiro, meanwhile, remained the image of Brazil most familiar abroad.

Mountains rising dramatically beside the sea.

Copacabana.

Ipanema.

Sugarloaf Mountain.

Christ the Redeemer surveying everything from above with considerably better views than most estate agents can offer.

Few cities possess geography so determined to show off.

Rio had been Brazil’s capital until Brasília replaced it, but losing the government did little to reduce its cultural importance.

It remained glamorous, crowded, musical, chaotic and visually spectacular.

In a country not short of scenery, Rio somehow still manages to insist that everyone look at it.

São Paulo offered another Brazil entirely.

Industrial.

Commercial.

Expanding at extraordinary speed.

Factories, offices and vast waves of migration were turning it into one of the world’s great metropolitan centres.

The São Paulo photographed in the early 1960s was already enormous, but it had not yet reached the staggering scale familiar today.

Which makes period photographs particularly entertaining.

A view described as showing “modern São Paulo” may now look positively tranquil.

Traffic occasionally appears capable of moving.

There are open spaces between buildings.

One suspects contemporary residents would regard this as historical fantasy.

Then there is the Amazon.

No book about Brazil can avoid it, partly because the Amazon Basin occupies such an absurd quantity of the country that attempting to ignore it would require folding the map.

The river itself is gigantic.

Its tributaries are gigantic.

The rainforest is gigantic.

Everything seems designed to make ordinary geographical adjectives inadequate.

European rivers generally know where their banks are.

The Amazon sometimes appears to regard banks as optional guidance.

In 1963, much of the Amazon remained extraordinarily remote.

Road connections were limited.

Large areas were accessible primarily by river or aircraft.

Indigenous communities lived in regions barely known to outsiders.

The enormous environmental debates that would later surround deforestation, mining, ranching and development had not yet reached anything like their modern international prominence.

At the time, the rainforest was often viewed through the very mid-century lens of unused resources awaiting development.

There were trees.

Minerals.

Land.

Rivers.

Clearly something had to be done with all this.

The possibility of simply leaving enormous parts of nature alone had not yet achieved full administrative popularity.

That difference in outlook is one of the things that makes old geographical books fascinating.

They do not merely show yesterday’s world.

They show yesterday’s assumptions about tomorrow.

Coffee naturally plays its part.

For generations Brazil had been one of the world’s dominant coffee producers, and huge plantations helped shape its economy and society.

For many foreign readers, Brazil and coffee were practically inseparable.

Before coffee shops acquired Italian terminology, loyalty apps and drinks requiring seven spoken modifications, there were simply beans.

Brazil grew an enormous number of them.

Sugar was another major crop.

So were cattle.

So were other agricultural products.

Brazil possessed—and still possesses—the slightly unfair advantage of having tremendous quantities of land and a climate capable of growing almost anything somewhere.

Economic development, however, was far from evenly distributed.

Brazil contained enormous wealth alongside serious poverty.

Modern apartment towers could exist relatively close to favelas.

Industrial development sat alongside subsistence agriculture.

Rich landowners controlled enormous estates while rural workers often lived in extremely poor conditions.

This contrast is central to understanding the country and makes the optimistic development photographs of the period particularly interesting today.

A shiny new factory tells one story.

The settlement behind it may tell another.

Brazil’s racial and cultural history is equally complex.

Portuguese colonisation.

Indigenous peoples.

Millions of enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic.

Later immigration from Europe, Japan and elsewhere.

All of these histories combined to produce an extraordinarily diverse society.

Brazil has one of the largest populations of African descent outside Africa and the largest Japanese-descended population outside Japan.

Which makes simplistic descriptions of “Brazilian culture” collapse fairly quickly.

Food changes by region.

Music changes.

Accents change.

Architecture changes.

Traditions change.

The country is less a single cultural landscape than several countries sharing an enormous administrative arrangement.

Elizabeth Bishop is an especially intriguing guide to all this.

One of the major American poets of the twentieth century, she moved to Brazil in the early 1950s and remained closely connected with the country for many years.

She therefore approached Brazil not merely as a visiting journalist collecting impressions between airports, but as someone who had actually lived there.

That gives the writing a more personal and observant quality than the usual geographical survey.

Bishop was particularly attentive to landscape, detail and the strange significance of ordinary things.

Which is useful in a country where the spectacular can easily overwhelm the everyday.

Brazil provides enough dramatic material for any photographer.

Carnival.

Beaches.

Rainforest.

Waterfalls.

Mountains.

Modern architecture.

Religious ceremonies.

Football stadiums.

But sometimes the most interesting historical image is simply a street.

A bus.

A shop.

A railway station.

A man leaning against a car.

A woman carrying shopping.

Because those are the things that vanish.

The mountain remains.

The bus gets scrapped.

Therefore, sixty years later, somebody will spend ten minutes trying to identify the bus.

Vintage illustrated books have this peculiar ability to become more interesting in places their publishers never intended.

A photograph included for the cathedral becomes valuable because of the petrol station next door.

A picture of a beach becomes fascinating because nobody is holding a mobile telephone.

A city street becomes astonishing because everyone seems to have gone outside without photographing themselves doing it.

1963 was a different age.

Brazilian football, of course, was already becoming legendary.

Brazil had won the World Cup in 1958.

Then it won again in 1962.

Pelé was already an international superstar.

So when this book appeared, Brazil was not merely good at football.

It appeared to have worked the game out.

Other countries had teams.

Brazil had an art form.

For generations afterwards, every Brazilian footballer would consequently inherit the modest expectation of being able to dribble past six defenders before breakfast.

No pressure.

Music was undergoing similar transformation.

Samba was already internationally recognised, while bossa nova had emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

João Gilberto.

Antônio Carlos Jobim.

A new, sophisticated sound associated particularly with Rio.

The Girl from Ipanema would soon become one of the most famous Brazilian songs in the world.

The country was exporting coolness remarkably efficiently.

Even people who had never visited Brazil could now imagine themselves sitting beside a Rio beach looking thoughtful while somebody played an impossibly relaxed guitar.

The political situation, however, was becoming considerably less relaxed.

In 1963 Brazil was governed by President João Goulart amid intense political and economic tensions.

The following year, in 1964, a military coup would overthrow him and begin a dictatorship lasting until 1985.

Again, that makes this volume particularly interesting.

It captures the country immediately before a major historical rupture.

There is no hindsight.

The photographs do not know a coup is coming.

The political analysis does not know exactly how events will unfold.

People are simply living in their present.

That gives old books a peculiar suspense.

We know the next chapter.

They don’t.

Within a year the political landscape described here would change dramatically.

Military governments would follow.

Political repression would increase.

Economic policies would shift.

And Brazilian society would enter another long and complicated period.

None of that is neatly folded into the narrative yet.

This is Brazil before it happened.

The book therefore works on several levels at once.

It is geography.

Travel.

Social history.

Political history.

Photography.

Architecture.

And an accidental record of a country standing at the edge of enormous political change.

It also belongs to that magnificent era when publishers apparently believed an entire country could be understood by producing one sufficiently substantial book.

Brazil is huge.

Fine.

Get a writer.

Get photographers.

Print maps.

Put everything between covers.

Problem solved.

No search engine required.

No embedded videos.

No notification asking whether you would like breaking news about Brazilian coffee futures.

No cookie banner covering half the Amazon.

If you wanted to learn about Brazil, you opened the book.

Then you continued opening it until you reached the other end.

An incredibly robust interface.

Obviously this is not a current guide to Brazil.

Do not use it for hotel recommendations.

Do not expect the road network to remain unchanged.

Do not quote its population figures without mentioning 1963.

And if it describes somewhere as an isolated coastal village, it may now contain three million people and an international airport.

But that is precisely why it is appealing.

The country has changed enormously.

The book hasn’t.

It preserves Brazil at a moment when Brasília was brand new, Pelé was conquering the football world, bossa nova was spreading internationally and the political order was about to be overturned.

Condition: Good. A vintage copy showing the normal signs of age and previous ownership expected from a book published in 1963, but remaining in good overall condition and perfectly suitable for reading, collecting or leaving on a coffee table beside an actual cup of Brazilian coffee in an unusually convincing display of thematic organisation.

A fascinating addition to a collection of Brazilian history, Latin American studies, Elizabeth Bishop, vintage geography, mid-century photography or 1960s travel and culture.

Also suitable for anyone who would like to explore the Amazon without mosquitoes, visit Rio without airport queues, and experience Brazilian football from an era when Pelé was still actually playing it.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where Brazil is enormous, the information is sixty years out of date, and fortunately the postage is calculated by the weight of the book rather than the size of the country.

Keep browsing: See more Travel books Other books by Elizabeth Bishop