When I first visited my birthplace, the story I wanted to tell myself—that the world wanted to tell about Brazil—was the triumphant tale of a country on the rise, emerging from a dictatorship to democracy. I spent that summer traveling the country by car, by bus, by boat, by plane, by foot. In my naivete, it felt as if Brazil were welcoming me home, but in retrospect I was as anonymous as any other gringo with a guidebook. Yet on an otherwise ordinary night at the bus station in downtown Belo Horizonte, I met my birth mother for the first time. She did welcome me home.
In the months and years that followed, I wrote maudlin fiction about Brazil, trying to render the city where I was born, the countryside where I grew up, trying to bring into focus a worldview of how I got from there to here and back again. Even thinking about that old work makes me cringe. The desperate wanting on the page. The desire to connect with my material, as if forging those links could make up for what was lost to me in real life.
Somewhere on the border between fantasy and fact, my imagination failed me. I needed to put aside the novel and return to my reporter’s notebooks.
Every ghost story is immortal. That's why we love them. Every ghost story ever can be twisted, repurposed, recycled and built into something else because, really, every ghost story is just a story of regret.
And Cargill gets that. He understands that a bad decision is what happens before the story starts and peace is what comes when it's done. In the middle is the change, the comeuppance, the duty, the sacrifice. In between is where the soul comes clean. All the blood and monsters are just window dressing.
Havoc should come with a health warning. Tom Kristensen’s novel, about a thirty-something literary critic who loses himself in a maelstrom of drink, jazz, and sex, is one of the most disturbing and absorbing accounts of self-destruction in modern European literature. Surely no one who reads it would think to disagree with the narrator of Per Petterson’s novel I Curse the River of Time, who says that Havoc “terrified me so the first time I read it that I promised myself and the god who did not exist that I would never ever touch alcohol.” Stretching to just over 500 pages, it is a Danish Inferno, a tortured descent through every circle of hell—and then some. Unlike The Divine Comedy, however, Havoc does not track the soul’s return to God; it is, rather, the story of a soul’s bewildering journey into itself.