THE BROTHERS
by Milton Hatoum & translated by John Gledson
A fraternal rivalry exacerbated by incestuous passion yields potent melodramatic consequences in this absorbing fourth novel (second in English translation) from the Brazilian author of The Tree of the Seventh Heaven (1994). Again, Hatoum focuses on a Lebanese immigrant, a trader named Halim, and his tragically conflicted family: twin sons Yaqub (a successful engineer hamstrung by his “calculating ambition”) and Omar (a drunken wastrel filled with “excessive hostility toward everyone and everything in the world”), their importunate younger sister Zania, and Halim’s tempestuous Brazilian wife Zana, whose love for the brooding Omar surges dangerously beyond the bounds of maternal devotion. Their story—which takes place in and near an economically depressed seaport city in the years following WWII—is sedulously pieced together by an initially unidentified involved narrator whose secondary, though crucial, relationship to Halim’s household is only gradually, and quite artfully, revealed.
A beautifully constructed story, replete with colorful incident and brisk, vivid characterizations, leaving a deeply ironic, bitter aftertaste. One of the better recent novels out of Latin America.