Reviewed by Travis McDonald

Early in João Gilberto Noll's slim novel Harmada, the main character meets a crippled man in a bar and, for reasons that are unclear to the reader, decides to go skinny dipping with him in a nearby river. The crippled man suddenly disappears into the water, never to surface again, and rather than search for the man, our narrator ruminates on this abrupt loss: "I stayed like that for quite a while, trying to take stock of those events, wondering if my memory was indeed composed of real events, by facts that surfaced in the seconds and minutes of that still-not-so-late night, or whether it was all the result of a brief collapse between the appearance of things and the intimate reality of things."

This statement could serve as something of an operating principle for this strange book, which moves from scene to scene in a dreamlike, seemingly random fashion without any of the traditional strictures of novelistic plot progression. An event occurs—the main character meets a boy playing soccer; he has a strange sexual encounter with an actress; he moves into a homeless shelter—and before the reader has time to plant their feet underneath themselves, they are, often abruptly, whisked away to another scene that does not seem in any logical way connected to the previous one.

This is a common feature of Noll's work, and English-speaking readers who are interested in exploring an avant-garde novel like this from one of Brazil's most acclaimed authors should become acquainted with his other works, Lord, Atlantic Hotel, and Quiet Creature on the Corner, all published by Two Lines Press. Though Noll passed away in 2013 at the age of seventy, in his birthplace, Porto Alegre, over the last few years, Two Lines has steadily published his most acclaimed novels translated by Edgar Garbelotto (Lord and Harmada) and Adam Morris (Quiet Creature and Atlantic Hotel).

Because a conventional plot seems to be the last thing on Noll's mind, it feels like somewhat of a futile task to describe the storyline of Harmada. But to keep it brief: an ex-actor wanders from place to place in the titular city, Harmada, getting a job as a typist in a salesman's office, having strange sexual escapades, becoming something of a preacher in a homeless shelter, and returning to the theatre where he directs a young woman named Cris who he has taken under his wing in various productions. The novel ends with Cris leaving the narrator, who then moves into an apartment where he finds a deaf and mute boy. The boy takes him through Harmada on the anniversary of its founding to the door of Pedro Harmada, the founder of the city, and we are left with our narrator on the verge of entering Pedro Harmada's home.

Again, the sequence of events seems ancillary to Noll's artistic vision here; or, at least, the logic of the progression of events. Instead, what animates this novel is its lack of coherence, its meditations on death, memory, performance, and art, and the hallucinatory experience that Noll cultivates on nearly every page. The novel feels almost as if it is being written as you read it and calls to mind the work of Argentinian writer César Aira, who is famous for writing his novels straight out without any revision whatsoever. Though Noll did not subscribe to this unorthodox technique, it does feel very much like the writer is following his subconscious concerning what happens next in the story, and because of this, Noll has drawn comparisons to his compatriot Clarice Lispector as well as American filmmaker David Lynch.

If the disconnected narrative of this book makes it sound like it might be a slog, interested readers should know that this novel can be consumed in a single sitting and might be best enjoyed this way. Rather than approach Harmada like a conventional novel, readers might find it more rewarding to experience the book the way they would a piece of music; that is, allowing the prose to wash over them and not become bogged down in making explicit sense of what they're reading. After all, Noll's philosophy of art seems to recommend this. In a 1997 interview in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Noll states: "I believe very strongly in art as a renewing, revitalizing potentiality. . . . That's to say, a novel that might bewilder you, dazzle you, mix you up a bit with the more instinctive forces of the universe, and not just be a chronicle of a few given social situations."

And this is exactly what the aesthetic experience of Harmada provides to its readers. We're not learning what it means to be a poor or middle-class Brazilian actor at the end of the twentieth century (the book was first published in 1993). Instead, the main character is driven by the writer's instincts about where the character should go next and the idiosyncratic interactions that he has. This aesthetic has garnered Noll the dubious distinction of being labeled as a postmodern writer, a description that Noll didn't seem to mind, though he bristled slightly at the suggestion when asked, claiming that the label didn't exactly fit because he was mainly a tragic writer and did not have any inclination whatsoever for the comedic.

There is truth in both of these statements. Noll does feel somewhat adjacent to postmodern writers in his subversion of storytelling norms and his characters' reflections on art and performance. But his brilliance is located in his wholly unique approach to narrative, characterization, and scene. It's not often that modern readers come across altogether original talents, and Noll's unorthodox approach to the novel might alienate some readers who depend on the conventional cruxes of literature to keep them interested. However, for those searching for a completely inimitable literary experience, Harmada just might be the novel you never knew you wanted to read.