Rubem Fonseca, writer who renewed Brazilian literature in the 20th century, dies at 94 | Rio de Janeiro

According to family members, Rubem Fonseca suffered a heart attack and was transferred to the Samaritan Hospital, in Botafogo, in the South Zone, but he did not resist. Until the last update to this article, there was no information about a funeral or burial.

Among his main books are the classic story volumes “Lucia McCartney” (1967), “Happy New Year” (1975) and “The Collector” (1979), in addition to the novels “The Morel Case” (1973), ” A gran arte “(1983) and” Agosto “(1990).

Marked by an urban style, violent, dry, erotic, full of profanity and without artifice, the writer’s literature was classified as “brutalist” by the critic Alfredo Bosi.

Among the main awards the author received are Camões, in 2003, and Machado de Assis, from the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL), in 2015.

At the time the award was announced, the institution said that the author “established himself for his nervous and agile narrative, at the same time classic and modern, between realism and the police, revealing Brazilian urban violence, without losing his eye sensitive because of the underlying human tragedy, the loneliness of big cities or the nuances of eroticism. “

“His moderate, ironic and cutting style at the same time denotes a reader of the classics and an attentive ear when talking about the streets of his time. He exerted a profound influence on our literary scene, inaugurating the trend that Alfredo Bosi calls ‘brutalist’ The statement continued.

In his youth, Rubem Fonseca worked as a police commissioner, a role in which he would influence his work, which at many times portrayed everyday life and characters from the underworld.

Recluse, contrary to public events and considered one of the most important names in our literature, it was known that the author was, in his privacy, a fun and respectful person, as the writer Nélida Piñón recalled in an interview with GloboNews to comment on the death of his friend.

Born in Juiz de Fora (MG) on May 11, 1925, José Rubem Fonseca moved to Rio at the age of 8.

In 1948, he graduated in Law. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Brazil. In 1952, he began working as a commissioner in the 16th district of the police, in São Cristóvão, in Rio. He remained in the police until 1954.

In the following decade, he provided services to the Institute for Research and Social Studies (Ipes), linked to the 1964 military coup. Later, he denied having supported the regime.

In 2015, when he received the Machado de Assis Prize, for the work as a whole, Rubem Fonseca quoted his debut book, written at the age of 17.

He also talked about how the job shocked the first editor it was offered to. The “problem” would have been, precisely, the presence of blasphemies in the text (watch, in the video above, an excerpt from the speech).

When asked about the fact that Machado de Assis and Eça de Queiroz, some of his inspirations, did not use bad words in their texts, Fonseca said that the words should not be discriminated against.

“I wrote 30 books. They were all full of obscene words. We writers cannot discriminate words. It makes no sense for a writer to say, ‘I can’t use this.’ Unless I write a children’s book. Every word has to be used, “he said.