Tropical Malaise

Rafaela Bassili reviews Stephen G. Bloom’s “The Brazil Chronicles.”

By Rafaela BassiliNovember 18, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• History

IN 1877, a journalist recently graduated from Cornell named A. J. Lamoureux sailed from New York to Rio de Janeiro to edit and publish the English-language newspaper The Rio News, which argued relentlessly for the abolition of slavery. Brazil was then absorbing some of the hangover from the United States Civil War as American Southerners flocked to the former Portuguese colony, where they could, along with thousands of their enslaved people, keep the practice of slavery alive.

Lamoureux picked conspicuous fights with advertisers, government bureaucrats, and enslavers and became something of a global abolitionist icon. But Lamoureux’s passion project couldn’t have lasted very long, with one man at its helm and almost no cash flow. The Rio News folded in 1901, 13 years after Brazilian abolition. Lamoureux moved back to the United States with his family, and another American expat, Ralph Bisett Ross, bought the press and assets a few decades later and started the tabloid Brazil Herald.

The story of the Brazil Herald is the heart of Stephen G. Bloom’s new book, The Brazil Chronicles. Billed as both a work of archival reporting and a “coming-of-age memoir,” the book takes on the history of English-language newspapers in Rio, from The Rio News to the Brazil Herald and, ultimately, the Latin American Daily Post, where Bloom, hired as a young journalist in the 1970s, tried to elevate his career much like Lamoureux had done.

The result is an engaging and ambitious book, but one that meanders, given the number of characters. Lamoureux’s story is told against the political and historical context of his time, and his interior life comes into focus through letters. But not every figure gets the same careful treatment, and they start to blur together in the anxious rhythm of the prose. One chapter is titled “Ralph, Betty, Zschech, Vic, Lee, Joe, and Frank.” Of course, not all these people are as interesting or emblematic as Lamoureux. Unfortunately, the people who are get lost in the excess.

It is a shame that Teddy Hecht, for example, only gets a few pages. She was the daughter of screenwriter Ben Hecht, who was involved with many of the 20th century’s most notable American productions: Gone with the Wind (1939), Stagecoach (1939), Design for Living (1933), Notorious (1946), and His Girl Friday (1940), among others. Having arrived in Rio with her husband, who was French Brazilian, Teddy Hecht worked at Sombra, a national fashion glossy and the first magazine for which Saul Steinberg designed a cover. Eventually, she wound up at the Brazil Herald, where her life resembled that of a “protagonist of an Irwin Shaw or Mary McCarthy short story.” She was funny, cosmopolitan, devoted to her career, glamorous, and only incidentally married, no small thing for a woman in the 1940s.

Sacrificing a more devoted approach to figures like Lamoureux and Hecht, Bloom is instead preoccupied with why The Rio News, the Brazil Herald, and the Latin American Daily Post couldn’t survive, a question whose answer he seems to have figured out early in the book. The Rio News, he writes, suffered from the same problems as its later counterparts:

chronic newsprint shortages, imported machinery that broke down with maddening regularity, unreliable and underqualified personnel, advertisers who reneged on bills, readers ticked off at the newspaper’s editorial stances, not to mention government interference, as well as an erratic national economy ravaged by chronic inflation.

As we trudge through the stories of The Rio News’ successors, nothing much changes besides the times. One of the biggest issues—apart from disorganized leadership who were much more interested in partying than devoting themselves to the noble pursuit of truth—was the fact that the paste-up guys couldn’t catch typos and mistakes because they didn’t speak English. Well, why should they?

Making my way through The Brazil Chronicles, something of a tome at 476 pages, I found myself defensively crossing my arms. It started with the marketing copy. “Bloom spent his formative years working in Rio’s seedy Lapa district, surrounded by expatriates, drug runners, and pornographers,” reads a lazy description that plays up Rio’s cultural stereotypes and makes Bloom’s experience sound a lot grittier than it actually was, while exoticizing Brazil to boot. Take this, for example: a churrasco, which is nothing more than the Brazilian equivalent of a barbecue or a cookout, is in Bloom’s description “an outdoor party of grilled meats.” Why not just say a Brazilian cookout? This belabored description has the unfortunate added effect of making a straightforward concept seem unfamiliar and therefore more exotic, and it’s indicative of Bloom’s overall convoluted prose.

I suppose you can’t totally blame Bloom, a trained journalist, for nearly removing himself from the narrative. The Brazil Chronicles is bookended by Bloom’s personal experience—his move from Berkeley to São Paulo to Rio and his eventual return to the United States—but the bulk of the story is a quilt of tales about the revolving cast of characters in the Brazil Herald’s newsroom. The book is much more an impressionistic collage of their experiences than a coming-of-age memoir—not that there is anything wrong with a digressive approach; I like a vignette as much as anyone else. What I couldn’t figure out was what was holding the vignettes together. By zeroing in on the Herald, what was Bloom trying to say about Brazil? Surely, there’s more there than favelas and churrascos.

I’m not usually so sensitive about this kind of thing. In fact, I was keen to read Bloom’s account because, in a way, his experience mirrored my own: he was an American writer in Brazil, and I’m a Brazilian writer in the United States. Besides, like many other Brazilians, I get excited when I see someone take a real interest in my country, and I try to be open-minded about the cultural judgments any visitor might make, as long as they are tethered to broader concepts.

Bloom missed one major opportunity to explore a wider lens on Brazilian culture in an early chapter devoted to a story called “Confederados,” reported from a São Paulo suburb. It’s a profile of Jim and Judith Jones, descendants of the once-sizable community of American expatriates who settled in the town of—that’s right—Americana after the Civil War.

The Joneses spoke in a kind of American-Brazilian dialect, with a Southern drawl that Bloom spelled out phonetically, resulting in nearly illegible quotes. “Dhat dohg don’t hunt,” Jim Jones says about Ronald Reagan, who by then was on the verge of winning the US presidency. “Dhat’s an expreshon mah granpappy yoused to youse all dah tyme.”

It was only in the interview’s 11th hour that Bloom asked the Joneses about race. Under Portuguese rule, and later independently, Brazil was second only to the Caribbean islands in the sheer volume of enslaved people from (mostly) West Africa trafficked onto its shores; records exist for more than three million people, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, and we know that is an undercount. Brazil is often misjudged as a less racist society than most because miscegenation there was so prominent that it’s hard to find anyone whose racial profile is entirely one thing or another. But this is not true. The legacy of slavery is evident in the dominating domestic service industry, the agricultural market, the favelas, crime, and above all in the gross class inequity, among the most egregious examples in the world.

Having apparently bought into this myth, Bloom believes that “[t]he separatist Confederate community in that way seemed thoroughly anti-Brazilian.” After Jim Jones uses a racial slur to argue that slave labor wasn’t the only reason that his ancestors came to Brazil, he hopes that Bloom won’t take offense. “I was enjoying the Joneses so much,” Bloom writes, “that I thought it impertinent to correct Jim’s mea culpa. They had been such hospitable hosts, and I felt an immediate guilt for not saying anything. Maybe a precursor to what would be called white privilege.”

That aside notwithstanding, there is little in this story about Brazil’s tense relationship to race. It has been more than 40 years since Bloom first reported on it. With this book, he has the advantage of hindsight, but he is content to stay on the surface. Rather than providing insight into American and Brazilian culture and the ways in which they might intersect on slavery and its tormented legacy, Bloom coasts on superficial observations that amount to little revelation. I wondered if he wouldn’t have benefited from reprinting the story as it appeared in the Los Angeles Times, where editors had accepted it from the Field News Service. At least then we would have encountered the story in the temporal context in which it was written, with the freshness of its perspective preserved.

Still, the story of the Joneses is a worthy one. So is the story of John Sullivan, a colleague of Bloom’s at the Daily Post who mysteriously died while on assignment for Hustler in El Salvador. (Sullivan is only one of several Americans whom Bloom and others suspected of being undercover CIA officers, a theory that, while it might sound tinfoil-hatted, tracks with the history of heavy US interference in Latin America at the time.) While I read the book, I repeatedly sounded off bits of information to my partner, about the Joneses, about Sullivan, about Nelson Rockefeller’s Rio sojourn, and about Hunter S. Thompson’s time spent reporting from there.

The black and white limestones that form Rio’s most iconic beach promenades on Copacabana and Ipanema make up alternately wavy and geometric designs that have become almost synonymous with the city itself. Just seeing them in a photograph can evoke the smells and tastes of the beach in Rio, which is unlike anywhere else. But if you consider the stones individually, they are chipped, sometimes fully broken; they’re dirty and seem random. They’re unable to evoke anything, in short, without that broader view. With The Brazil Chronicles, whose cover picture shows the classic Copacabana promenade, Bloom took the mosaic for the stones.