Books in Brief: The Vampire of Curitiba and Other Stories

The Vampire of Curitiba and Other Stories, by Dalton Trevisan (Knopf, 268 pp., $7.95). The title is as deceptive as is the direction of a seemingly simplistic style. Trevisan’s concern with predators is real. A haunting reality is interwoven with the depths of despair. His genre is the tale of the dispossessed—the doomed— living lives of desperation, quiet and otherwise. Possessing the touch of a conductor, the author orchestrates a rhythmic symbolism saturnine in implication and sobering in intent. The victims are forebodingly vivid. A man separated from his family endures the endlessness of a lonely hotel room. The degenerate seducer appears more despicable for a moral ambivalence that consumes his daughter. A tormented marriage plumbs the abyss of human degradation. An insomniac searches incessantly for the thread of his tormented being. There is the anguish and the anonymity of an existence within a children’s asylum. The flotsam of humanity is awash upon the pages of these sketches. This collection is the evocative Brazilian’s initial English translation. It should not be his last. A. MILLER