Books in Brief: The Capital of Hope

The Capital of Hope, by Alex Shoumatoff (Coward, McCann, 209 pp., $11.95). How strange that this book devoted to glorifying that artificial, soul-shrinking monstrosity, Brasilia, should at the same time convey better than any other the alegría and color humano of the most heart-warming of countries! When it comes to describing the destitute migrants from the overpopulated coast who built Brazil’s capital, communicating their funloving fatalism, and telling how he found a wife among them, Shoumatoff is a peerless reporter; finding words to embody the geology, botany, and atmospheric glory of the planalto, he is a poet. Why then does he swallow without a murmur of skepticism the self-serving rhetoric of the Marxist intellectuals who conceived and built these abstract glass-and-concrete palaces with the arrogant presumption that they would be just what the landless and homeless needed, bankrupting democratic Brazil in the process and destroying one of its last eco-systems? The only explanation is that a good reporter reports what he is told no matter who tells it, and that this one was unlucky enough not to have seen (or noticed) the countervailing hosannas of Rio’s favelas, Salvador’s colonial and Afro-Brazilian concerto, or the songs of the popular artists and poets. Though he quotes my first book on Brazil to concede that enthusiasm for this city has not been unanimous, he neglects to report that Brazil’s great troubadour-poet, Vinícius de Moraes, told me he couldn’t live there. He does, however, include the giveaway conclusion of the very man who planned Brasilia: “I asked him if he ever thought of living there. ‘Me?’ he answered. ‘Never.’”

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Selden Rodman

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The Capital of Hope, by Alex Shoumatoff (Coward, McCann, 209 pp., $11.95). How strange that this book devoted to glorifying that artificial, soul-shrinking monstrosity, Brasilia, should at the same time convey better than any other the alegría and color humano of the most heart-warming of countries! When it comes to describing the destitute migrants from the overpopulated coast who built Brazil’s capital, communicating their funloving fatalism, and telling how he found a wife among them, Shoumatoff is a peerless reporter; finding words to embody the geology, botany, and atmospheric glory of the planalto, he is a poet. Why then does he swallow without a murmur of skepticism the self-serving rhetoric of the Marxist intellectuals who conceived and built these abstract glass-and-concrete palaces with the arrogant presumption that they would be just what the landless and homeless needed, bankrupting democratic Brazil in the process and destroying one of its last eco-systems? The only explanation is that a good reporter reports what he is told no matter who tells it, and that this one was unlucky enough not to have seen (or noticed) the countervailing hosannas of Rio’s favelas, Salvador’s colonial and Afro-Brazilian concerto, or the songs of the popular artists and poets. Though he quotes my first book on Brazil to concede that enthusiasm for this city has not been unanimous, he neglects to report that Brazil’s great troubadour-poet, Vinícius de Moraes, told me he couldn’t live there. He does, however, include the giveaway conclusion of the very man who planned Brasilia: “I asked him if he ever thought of living there. ‘Me?’ he answered. ‘Never.’”