Night of October 7, 2018. Brazilians hold momentous elections that could make the far-right Jair Bolsonaro president. A group of young people commits a crime: they murder a gay boy in cold blood. A hate crime that the electoral campaign has been able to give rise to. But the victim had a past that the detectives in charge of the case will gradually unpack, returning to October 27, 2002, when Lula da Silva became president of Brazil.
Brazilian Psycho (Salamandra). The novel by Joe Thomas that closes the São Paulo quartet, covers 15 years of Brazilian history through characters who roam the favelas, the middle-class neighborhoods and the most elegant enclaves of an immense, happy, dangerous city , corrupt, a place that generates love and hate alike. Brazilian Psycho is a political story, but even more about people, lives, loves, in short, universal stories.
How long did you live in São Paulo and why?
My wife was from there. I worked as a teacher in a British school. I spent almost 10 years in that city that gave me energy. But it is also a difficult place, because of the traffic, the crime and the size. I was happy there, but I was also happy when I returned to London.
A good part of your novel takes place in a favela, Paraisópolis, what is it like to live in a favela?
I lived in front of Paraisópolis, the largest favela in the city. I could see it from my balcony. I passed by there every morning on my way to work. It’s like a rabbit hole. A claustrophobic place. The buildings are piled up. They are communities run by criminals. Safe places for its inhabitants, but not for outsiders and even less so for a gringo like me. The class division in São Paulo is very pronounced.
In Brazilian Psycho he describes the rise to power of Lula de Silva. How was she? Did it generate excitement?
At first there was a lot of optimism, because it coincided with a period of economic boom, with the nomination for the Rio Olympic Games and the Soccer World Cup.
But then came social corruption…
Yes. Lula devised the Family Fund so that poor people would have more resources. For the novel, I devised that the gangs that govern the favela kept the money from the Family Fund, although they gave food to the inhabitants. Later I discovered that this was real and I realized that if I had had an idea, the criminals had thought of it long before, they are smarter than me.
And political corruption…
To try to maintain a coalition, a majority and a government, it was necessary to pay parliamentarians a monthly payment. The mensalão scandal soon broke out, which seemed enormous, but came to nothing when the Lava Jato money laundering operation was revealed. There were many other plots. The network of connections was endless and that helped me articulate it in the novel.
Those scandals ended Lula, but now he is president of Brazil again. Have Brazilians forgiven him?
Despite everything, the Bolsa de Familia made a difference and many people thought, ‘he steals but he gets things done’. At first, as an Englishman, I thought it was something typical of Latin America, but I realized that this was a gesture of arrogance on my part, because similar things happen in London and we don’t have the honesty to say it so clearly, we We hide behind the British facade as if we were superior due to our democratic origins.
