It’s been said that the worst thing about being poor in the U.S. is not the poverty itself, but its circumstances. Or, to quote Steve Sailer, “The working definition of a poor person in modern America is somebody who can’t afford to get away from other poor people.” Well, it’s like that too if you’re a Latin American author: you can’t distance yourself from other Latin American authors. Your readers will compare you to them. ‘Course it doesn’t help if you invite them to do that, by quoting another such author. Thus did the Brazilian Marcelo Rubens Paiva at the very front of his 1986 novel Blecaute, where he chose for an epigraph something from the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa: “It’s the themes that choose the writer. I have always had the feeling that there were certain stories I had to write, that I had no way to avoid them. But there exists an element the average reader finds difficult to apprehend: the narrator of a story is never the author. He’s always an invention.”

Another burden of the Latin American writer: the Latin American reader. He’s so average! Plus he thinks the person telling the story is the person who wrote the story! How estúpido can you get? Anyway, I’d been meaning for some time to read Blecaute. It’s set in São Paulo and sort of apocalyptic, and I’d wondered why there isn’t more literature like that, in a country with such huge ugly cities. Well, Blecaute is consistent with if it does not quite verify what I said earlier: Brazilians themselves are not much bothered by how their cities look. In point of fact, and this is stated right after the Vargas Llosa quote, Rubens Paiva is basing his story on The Twilight Zone. Apparently the whole show, not a certain episode. Wherever the theme came from, how is it handled?

And whichever way it is: what does this book unintentionally spill about Brazil in general?

As the main characters are three college kids, I think the reader learns more than he may want to about what goes on in their world. At the very beginning, the narrator attends a presentation by an Italian speleologist, a most exciting and inspiring talk – even though it’s all in Italian and he doesn’t know any. Is this sort of high-noise-to-signal telegraphy normal at Brazilian universities? Is it all that anyone expects at such institutions? Maybe. Later in the book, a cop who has decided to take mercy on the narrator and his pals for smoking dope urges them to scram and go resume their studies “for the good of Brazil”…and I had to wonder if such well-intended injunctions really were delivered by grownups thereabouts. Still later, the narrator speaks with apparent enthusiasm of the excitements of law school. I’ve never quite believed it, but many South Americans actually feel that way. And not just the adults. The author (or is it the narrator) is offhanded, fashionably dismissive of square society, but since he seemed to belabor it, I got the idea that, even in South America, parents know best, and care about their kids. And that‘s an idea I should never have mislaid.

As for other-than-or-anything-but-higher-educational preoccupations….at one point the narrator speaks of finding places in this now vacant city to watch sunsets. I never even thought of that. Even in Florianópolis, living just a few minutes’ walk from two bays that faced west, I seldom went out for the evening show. In Brazil, urban expectations, like educational expectations, aren’t nil, but they are low. I think Brazilians think that if you’ve got a city, or a university, that’s enough. Quality is hardly appraised.

At this point and no later, I should probably give a brief summary of such plot as there is. After that cave-exploration talk, Rindu and his friends Mário and Martina resolve to do some spelunking of their own, not far from São Paulo. While they are below, a river that runs through that same cave rises, and they are stranded, for four days. They ration food, and light, and at last the waters subside and they get out. Only on the drive back to the big city do they perceive that something awful has overtaken their world. Such vehicles as they see on the highway are stopped, in no particular way. Their occupants – indeed, everybody on Earth – is paralyzed. And they remain that way, non-rotting meat statues, for years it seems. Animals, however, including birds and insects, continue alive and active.

Latin Americans can be good writers but they sure aren’t good storytellers. In their defense, though, I will note that “survival procedural” is hardly a genre even in English. The three kids futz. They find some guns, and shoot them. They find some parachutes, and jump off buildings. They find a stable, and release the horses. Mário decides he’d like to break into their old high school and destroy all records of his grades; this he does. There really is no pressure to do anything at all. Contrary to the title, which is the Brazilian Portuguese representation of the English word “blackout,” electricity stays on in most places. The very possibility of a power outage isn’t even broached ’til page 113. There is voiced some interest in building a windmill or at least finding a portable generator; such interest peters out. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of frozen food. Refrigerators, and lights, and VCRs – they watch lots of movies – continue to function. There’s plenty of fuel too, for cooking, and for cars.

I had the distinct impression that the author really didn’t know how to end his book. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a book. Or even a short story. On the other hand, a haiku would’ve been too short. A limerick? Mmmaybe. I’d guess a really tight sonnet just might’ve got the job done.

I did like the part where the trio is heading back to street level from some building’s 32nd floor, and they hear a ding and the elevator stops at the 29th! The door opens. An old woman is there. She is wearing a hood that covers her eyes, but the rest of her face is visible. She smiles. She says nothing. Everybody is so surprised, nobody gets on or off. The door closes. This character may have been glimpsed much later in the book, but at a great distance, so it’s impossible to say. Likewise with the occasional sensations of an airplane overflying the city. These dangled details are however artless: they amount to nothing and change not at all such a tale as there is.

Nevertheless, another part I liked was when Martina takes over a radio station, and broadcasts music. She also turns on radios all over town. It’s nowhere near enough to fill the big city with sound. But it’s nice to think about!

As for whether any of this book is even quotable: that’s a tough call, but as Rindu is watching a puma tour the house in which they have installed themselves, he says, “At that moment, I wanted to be implacable.” I’ll buy that. Not that he himself did.

I suppose the question about every fictional or proposed apocalypse is Well, what would YOU do? and since I myself don’t know, I shouldn’t criticize. This is not, and perhaps cannot be, a great book. But no regrets reading it! I didn’t even mind not hearing more about a road trip to North America. Page 193 has on it just a command to wait half an hour before reading the last chapter. I obeyed. You don’t have to. It was obvious, from the total absence of details in the final five pages, that certainly the author at least had never made such a journey. The narrator lists some cities in the U.S.; he also mentions Mexico; then he comes back to find São Paulo unchanged.