Number four - Arte Sesc and Graciliano Ramos

Already I can see that it will be tough to make my goal of fifty new adventures before turning fifty! But every new adventure counts and there are still a number of attractions to explore in my own neighborhood, Flamengo! So I set out on a Sunday stroll to discover Arte Sesc wich is literally just around the corner...

Hidden behind green trees and a little lost between the tall apartment buildings it was easy to find on Rua Marques de Abrantes 99. As I entered the well kept little garden I wondered why I had never noticed the building before.

It turned out that the building from 1912, designed by the architect Gustavo Adolphsson to be the home of the Figner Family, had been closed for the public for a number of years. It has now been reopened, and to celebrate the 450 years of Rio de Janeiro it reopened with an exhibition featuring the life and the writing of the Brazilian author Graciliano Ramos.

A very long time ago I read Graciliano Ramos' book "Vidas secas" ( Barren Lives) from 1938, so I walked happily up the stairs. As always, though, I just had to stop to admire some of the details of the little palace of a house. The entrance door was spectacular:

And beside it were the most beautiful tiles:

And so even before I entered I was happy! The exhibition turned out to be very worthwhile, Graciliano Ramos, I discovered, wrote "Vidas Secas" while living in Rio de Janeiro, just down the road at Catete. 

He wrote essays about the Rio de Janeiro of his time, and I was delighted to see that some things never change...while others do...here is a picture of Largo de Alencar at the time Graciliano lived close by:

It has changed so much that I could not quite place the streets around it, and this is just down the road.

Graciliano Ramos was in prison for a while, at Ilha Grande, accused of being a communist. After he got out he was received by the Minister of Education and a friend of his commented: "What is good about this country is this: a little while ago you were in jail, just now you were received by the Minister of Education without having an appointment." To which Graciliano replied: "That is true, but don't forget that the inverse is also true. You can be here to see the Minister and a few hours later you can be put in jail. That is the real Brazil."

The exhibition showed how politically active Graciliano Ramos was and how critical he was of the situation of the poor in Brazil. 

His book "Barren Lives", that I read so many years ago, is about poor peasants suffering with the drought in the north of Brazil. What I remember best from the book, though, is the story of Baleia, the poor family's dog. The dog has a dream, and the fact that it did, and what it dreamed about I never forgot. At the exhibition I learned that the chapter containing Baleia's dream was the first the author wrote, he then spun the book around that chapter. 

As I walked out of Arte Sesc I decided to finally read a book by Graciliano Ramos that I have had in my bookshelf for a while: "Anguish" from 1936, said to be the book Graciliano Ramos himself thought his best. And so, one adventure leads to the next...