Harmada: A Novel by João Gilberto Noll
Reviews
By Marshall Shord
The late Brazilian author João Gilberto Noll’s novel Harmada begins in media res with its unnamed narrator deciding to wallow for a bit in a muddy field. An errant soccer ball soon interrupts his intended reverie. Within a few short paragraphs, he is spitting into the wound of the child who kicked the ball and muttering to himself about the medical practices of Mesopotamia (“The cure lies within, that was the way in Mesopotamia”). But for the detail of the soccer ball that places them in the modern era, there is no context for such a disturbing scene and no explanation will be offered. It is a bewildering experience and, as such, the perfect introduction to the world of Harmada.
One of the qualities that make this odd, propulsive little novel so alluring is that the life of the narrator and the world he moves through are, as the German literary critic Erich Auerbach describes the stories of the Old Testament, “fraught with background.” Noll bundles that old song about a man forced to acknowledge the growing limitations and curdled pleasures of his “spent middle age” within a narrative that moves with the force of a waterfall and the paratactic logic of a creation story.
Except for an interlude near the middle of the book in what is only described as a “shelter”—but which resembles a mental institution of some sort—things just keep happening. Noll won’t stop to concretely place a detail when he can mention it in passing. Scene piles on scene with little to no explanation or connection to what preceded it. The narrator wonders at one point if he is in hell, and indeed it does seem rather hellish to exist without some mediating scrim to sort the onrush of daily events into a coherent account of one’s life.
These are some of the things that we do learn about the narrator and his world: Harmada is the name of the capital city of an unnamed country that resembles Brazil. As a young man, the narrator moved there to become an actor, and for a time was successful. By the time the novel opens, this life seems far in his past. After leaving the boy and the muddy field, already teetering on dissociation (“Were these my nails I was looking at?”), he enters a house he seems familiar with and meets a woman he knows by name. In what he identifies as his bedroom, he gathers some clothes he had forgotten “a few months ago” and leaves. He goes drinking, takes a disquieting night swim with a stranger, checks into a hotel, watches a play, and has group sex. He later discloses that he was married in the past but that his wife left him for a younger man because he was sterile. It becomes apparent that more than once he has fled from his circumstances when life hasn’t met his expectations.
The familiarity of such details is obscured by inexplicable happenings, gnomic utterances, and syntax that at times can be so contingent as to be meaningless. At a lonely nexus where Richard Ford’s chronicles of the disappointments of aging for a certain male creative type intersect with the menace imbuing the everyday in the films of David Lynch, perches Harmada.
Halfway through, the novel changes, focusing its until-then-antic attention (though without losing any of its fleetness) on the creative partnership and familial dynamic that develop between the narrator and Cris, a teenage runaway he meets at the shelter, who is also, improbably, the daughter of a long-lost fling from earlier in the book. While Cris is at the shelter to work out a deep psychic disturbance, the narrator discerns in her manner a concealed yearning for the stage and has a crucial revelation about his role in life: “I—way past time to be an actor again—now possessed the necessary tricks of a director.”
Cris’s entrance into his life breaks him out of the second childhood he has enjoyed at the shelter, where everything is taken care of for him and he spends his time narrating bits of his past to his fellow shelterers (implying, at one point, with no elaboration, that he might have been the product of a virgin birth). He is now, as they both half-jokingly say, her father. Their baroque conjurings of a nonexistent shared past, which they fabricate in interviews when Cris’s one-woman show begins to attract attention, are some of the most evocative and entertaining passages of the book.
For much of the remainder of Harmada, the mythical trappings that enwrap the first half of the novel recede. What emerges is the rather mundane tale of a man finding some success as a stage director, reconnecting with an old friend or two, and reestablishing a small life in the city he once fled. (Though Noll does manage to fit in a Biblical deluge and an extended passage where the narrator hallucinates a sexual encounter between himself, transformed into some sort of bovine creature, and a female of his species.)
The narrative then seems to be heading toward something of a bittersweet conclusion. The narrator loses his “daughter” as Cris matures, becomes a star, and moves in with a new boyfriend. Unburdened again, he finds a new apartment, one with a peaceful view of a convent, and plans to start over.
But absent any role to anchor him, surreality floods back into his life. In an echo of the novel’s opening sequence, the narrator discovers a boy standing in the kitchen sink of his new apartment. The boy, who is deaf and mute, leads him outside. The streets of Harmada are teeming with revelers, for it is the anniversary of the city’s founding. Inspired, the narrator recounts the story—self-consciously laden with overtones of The Aeneid and the European “discovery” of the so-called New World—of the wayward soldier Pedro Harmada landing upon the shore of an unknown land and declaring to no one in particular that there he would establish a city. The novel closes with the narrator and the boy knocking on the door of an apartment building that is leaking water at an alarming rate. Pedro Harmada, shirtless and teenaged, answers and invites them inside.
A novel as allusive and parsimonious with its narrative context as Harmada begs the reader to engage with it as if it were a puzzle to be solved. But the references to heroes and serpents, mysterious playwrights and haunted poets, lost loves and old friends, ultimately lack consequence. They are but the detritus swept along in the floodwaters of its narrative. For this is Harmada’s achievement: its power to move, wiping out any impediments to its progress—even the expected handholds of a traditional novel.
The image of flowing water that recurs throughout the novel is not just a motif; it is its substance:
the sovereign abundance of the river—that river whose inner nature ignored the sun, the sky, the stars, and the moon, didn’t give a damn about the two of us bathing in its waters, didn’t even give a damn about the fish and animals traveling in its guts—the river just haughtily flowed.
The river’s indifference is Noll’s indifference to the demands of the reader. It is a rare and thrilling experience to just jump in and tumble along, weightless in the onrush.
Marshall Shord lives in Maryland. He is currently at work on a novel about the formation of the CIA.
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