Camila von Holdefer, 28, is a Brazilian literature critic and philosophy academic. She publishes her reviews on her own website, in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, and on the Moreira Salles Institute blog and the Carambaia Publishing House’s blog, among others. In this interview, building on her ten-piece series on literary criticism in Brazil, she elaborates on some of the issues surrounding the literary readership in Brazil, as well as Brazilian book publishing in general and the role of the critic.
Maíra Mendes Galvão (MMG): As an opener to this interview, I’d love it if you could give us a brief description of the present Brazilian literature scene, from your point of view and a panorama of literary criticism in Brazil: who are the critics, where do they publish, where does the readership go in search of references?
Camila von Holdefer (CvH): Brazilian literature, it seems to me, is in a much better position than its criticism. Not long ago, writer Sérgio Sant’Anna published a piece in the newspaper Estadão insinuating that there’d been an explosion in the number of authors. Many people scoffed at his statement, but that is more or less what’s happening, I mean, Sant’Anna is right. There is a large number of published authors now. This happened because of an increase in both the number of small, quality publishing houses and the availability of self-publishing platforms and services that have little to no concern at all about the quality of the work.
So, what transpires is that it isn’t very difficult to get published. Actually, it’s never been easier. Consequently, the critics are faced with an amount of new books that they will never get around to reading. If there are three or four truly exceptional writers among the newcomers, it is unlikely that we’ll manage to get to them. And this is because there is a huge demand that reviewers can no longer meet. I get around ten e-mails a week from authors asking me to review their books. There isn’t the least chance that I will manage one third of that. Even with a joint effort by the critics, there wouldn’t be enough outlets where we could publish those reviews. There are few supplements, independent or in newspapers, that are still printing (or posting) reviews. The Ilustrada supplement of Folha de S.Paulo is one of them, perhaps the one that’s most attuned to diversity. O Globo and Estadão also include some reviews from time to time. There is Suplemento Pernambuco, with good articles and reviews, and Jornal Rascunho, of mixed quality (some collaborators are excellent, some are terrible: it’s all or nothing).
Contrary to what people usually say, we do have good critics. There are critics of all styles, some are more academic, some more journalistic. To each their own: they complement each other well. There are also young critics such as Kelvin Falcão Klein, already showing original and consistent work. This is important when we consider that the biggest problem among aspiring or young critics is the lack of originality: it is noticeable that most are someone else’s spawn, and I do not say this in a general sense, but specifically: it’s easy to guess, in the second paragraph, the actual voice behind most texts. From the first paragraph to the last, those texts take after, let’s say, a powerful role model. Not all of them manage to make the work speak for itself, without a crutch (or plagiarism). This worries me. But most of them still publish only in blogs or personal websites.
MMG: That is interesting. It seems that the image people have of the book publishing business is far from reality. Everyone talks about the end of print and that literature is in its death throes, but you confirm that there are many people writing and publishing books. What do you think is the actual issue there, the actual sore point, masked by this erroneous perception?
CvH: I imagine that the actual sore point – and it is something that often gets spelled out in full – lies in the quality of the better part of what gets published. The sole concern of a publishing house dedicated to self-publishing is profit. The contents of the books are of little interest. If the author pays the stipulated sum (and they can be steep), they get published. It’s very simple. Not that this is any news. Many good authors, and not just Brazilian authors, have footed their own bills for a first book. The phenomenon isn’t new, what is new is the scale of its occurrence. Amazon itself is favoring that. I get sent files from time to time from writers asking me to read and review their work. There is no record of the title, no publisher behind it. The author wrote it, attached the file and hit send. It is easy to understand why some of us (and I imagine that to be the case of the experienced Sérgio Sant’Anna: he may not be a critic but I’m sure he gets requests for opinions) are quite tired.
MMG: Another distorted perception, especially in some feminist circles, is that women are marginalized in the industry and need to conquer more space there. But the reality these days is that women comprise the majority of those working in publishing and writing and selling books. It seems to me that the bigger issue is how women are portrayed in literature, and how excluded they are from the canon – what do you think?
CvH: As for the women, that’s a more complicated issue. Generally speaking I agree with you: I also think that what really makes a difference is the way their work is edited and how they are portrayed and the tenor of the comments made about them. As a critic, I think some maneuvers are lacking in efficiency. They may be beneficial for readers, but not always for the critics. I am not very partial, for instance, to the idea of prioritizing women authors. I side with Susan Sontag on this: what matters is the formative quality, a good foundation that involves reading all kinds of things, with no pretentious aspirations to justice or revisionism. We need more Sontags: cultured essayists with good references that have read all sorts of things. This helps to make a difference.
MMG: To what extent are digital influencers—bloggers and youtubers—who talk about books determining the direction of brazilian culture, as the youth seems to be the main target audience these days?
CvH: I believe that young digital influencers are not dictating yet—at least not entirely—what publishers put out. I mean, of course there are books by young upstarts being published, but our literature catalog doesn’t suffer on that account. The bloggers cannot take the place of the likes of Daniel Galera, for instance. To the contrary, our literature catalog has benefited from them. They sell more, so those books end up improving the situation of a publishing house navigating an economic crisis. In that sense, they make it possible for the publishers to keep the authors who don’t sell as many copies.
What it seems to me is that this internet-born niche is still not very open to criticism, and I mean that in many senses. Criticism is perceived as elitist for questioning some of the procedures. The argument is that criticism is, generally speaking, a craggy crone with hardly any ties to the spirit of our times, and as such is unable to give meaningful input about what it doesn’t understand. That is, there would be two distinct spheres: on one side, there’s criticism and, on the other, books written for a young audience. Not to mention that there are two types of criticism: that of the books themselves and that of the actual phenomenon. Perhaps out of fear of being cast as anachronistic if it is negative, perhaps out of a lack of interest, specialized criticism has been leaving the reviews of those books to young readers, bloggers, and youtubers themselves. So far, so good. But I don’t understand why one cannot question absolutely anything related to this niche. For instance, the fact that there are adults who consume heaps of YA literature baffles me. What leads a 30-something to read stories about teenagers facing the common foibles of their age, such as pimples, first kisses, bullying? I don’t know, but I know that questioning such things is not acceptable. Most of us would rather remain silent.
MMG: You mention Michel Laub’s statement that the critic is a defender of literature, someone who dedicates their time and mental space to keeping it alive. In what measure is it the critic’s duty to keep literature alive? Nowadays, it seems that everything has to have a popular appeal in order to survive; however, literature with that kind of appeal is exactly the kind less favored by critics. Does that pose an obstacle to that possible duty of a critic?
CvH: It does, no doubt about it. There is a divide between what actually sells and what the critics review and applaud. Few authors are able to sustain good sales numbers and good reviews at the same time. And even when they do, I believe, those numbers are hardly as expressive as the ones in the wake of, for instance, the terrible “Fifty Shades of Grey”. Some relatively successful authors such as, for instance, Haruki Murakami, sell a lot less than that (and Murakami is far from being a shoo-in among critics). But I do not think that the space between readers and criticism should be shortened. It is not the role of the critic to reach for the average reader. Criticism cannot surrender to what has popular appeal, at the risk of losing what makes it critical. Its foremost duty is to literature. In that sense, I really couldn’t say good things about E. L. James. I see no obstacle there, unless the critic’s guideline—and here we go back to blogs and booktubers whose focus is the audience instead of quality—rests in the number of readers they attract. It is only natural that criticism will attract as many readers as a good book, which means fewer readers than the softcore porn audience. Not that criticism should be impenetrable. I’ve always been against that. It’s hard to find a middle ground.
MMG: Brazilian culture, I think we can say, is averse to negativity; it is a culture of evasion of conflict, of exaltation of a spirit of joy at any cost, of celebrating in order to forget about life’s woes. There’s also a tendency to take things personally. Does that explain, at least partially, the ad hominem attacks frequently directed at the critic? Or have I gone too far?
CvH: What an excellent question. You put it all very clearly, and I agree with you. I don’t know if that’s actually stronger in the Brazilian culture, but the critic has never been looked at with kind eyes. The only reason why there is less hatred directed at them than at, say, a soccer referee (excusing the flimsy points of comparison) is that literature has a significantly lesser appeal. If there is someone who does criticism to get attention, they will soon be frustrated. The critic, as a general rule, is someone who must know how to take a beating and how to hit back. Without it, they cannot handle the task. I also do not know many critics who nurtured grand illusions about humanity. And the critic must really love literature, must be persistent, almost stubborn, or they won’t resist either. Confrontation with authors and readers is not uncommon. Sometimes, the showdown may be clean and high-minded, meaning there are arguments and clear rules about what can and cannot be said when there is dissent, but that isn’t often the case.
Most of the time, what happens is, like you mentioned, ad hominem attacks. This does demonstrate the low level and the childishness of our debates. Authors who defend their own work by labeling a critic as repressed or begrudging have an equivocated idea of what criticism is and the motivations of someone who sets out to do it. But yeah, negative commentary is seen in an extremely poor light around here. There are authors who subtly—or not so subtly—suggest that the more stern critics should be barred from writing on their media outlets. Meaning: “please, bring back the old indulgence!” Over the last few years, Brazil has had very few more incisive critics. Cronyism, publicity, euphemism, and soft-focus prevailed. They actually still prevail, which is why some authors are extremely uncomfortable with anything else. For my part, I hope to contribute toward changing that. If there is something to say in my favor, and in fact there isn’t much, it’s that enmity doesn’t bother me much. Making criticism also means making enemies. Those who dismiss that possibility or repel it would not be able to do it.
MMG: I will follow with another question regarding our culture. We are witnessing what seems to be the culmination of a capitalist mindset here in Brazil, which, differences aside, mirrors the American way (or at least unfolds similarly). This economic and political path favors (and even creates) a primacy of the individual, of identity, that is, an affirmation of the self and an appeal to individual desires (and needs, whether preexisting or created by the industry complex). Stopping short of saying one is a consequence of the other, but pointing out that they are concomitant movements, I’d say that the ideas of cultural appropriation and “lugar de fala” (something like hijacking the discourse of minorities) are on the rise, and those concepts are related to an ideology of identity that steers dangerously close to this individualism. Do you see this cultural trend coming out in current literature in any way?
CvH: You are right, once again. We have outsourced this ideology from North America, with a few years’ delay. I wouldn’t know how to relate this individualism (the exaltation of identity and identity movements) with the literary output itself, only to criticism. So I will offer a more generic answer, from the standpoint of the readership and the reception of both specialized critics and readers. It seems to me that we cling to concepts that, in spite of the popularity they have garnered around here, we still haven’t quite absorbed. Specialized criticism, both academic and journalistic, is, of course, better equipped to manipulate certain ideas. It is not uncommon, although I do not agree with most of those approaches, to see excess or bizarre opinions on literary reviews. The average reader, on the other hand, now that they get to express themselves both in personal blogs and in comments sections of major bookshops’ websites, still can’t quite understand what this exercise entails. This yields terrible analyses, such as a book being immediately rejected because it features a rape scene, or a heterosexual author being rejected for creating a gay character. I mean, we are starting to walk on eggshells when it comes to literature, but literature should be a space for freedom.
MMG: Recalling a conversation I had as a teenager, someone once told me everyone can be a reader, it’s just a matter of finding the right genre of literature that fits them. I also remember my first time out of Brazil: I took the underground as soon as I left the airport and saw many, many people reading all kinds of books, mainly best-sellers. That seems to suggest that readers are more homogenous, so what was it that was really motivating them to read? Do you agree with that “right fit” theory that there’s a kind of book for every potential reader? And do you think the same could apply to criticism (is there a “genre” of criticism for each reader)? What do you think of that idea of “universal” when it comes to books, and do you think there could be such a thing as universal criticism? Are these ideas incompatible?
CvH: That “right fit” theory doesn’t seem to hold, for me. Some people will just bever become readers, no matter what books might or might not interest them. I know people who are particularly wary of literature and the arts (with the exception of cinema, curiously) in general. I’m not talking about people who were made to read books they didn’t like in school, that is, slightly traumatized folks, but people who detest any kind of literature, who despise it really, think it’s useless, laugh about those who read. This kind of person is more common than one would think. There are even professors like that, humanities professors. It’s very disheartening.
On the other hand, I believe there’s a small handful of readers that we may lose during school years: people who could become good readers but got confronted with the wrong books. An impenetrable classic may not be the best choice for a 12 year-old. Literature is also a habit—it’s formation. And a child will hardly be equipped to like “Ulysses”. Meaning, I choose a middle ground: yes, there are books that can favor or benefit the blossoming of a reader, but there are people who, either by personal inclination or acquired belief, will not turn into readers. And that’s fine. As for criticism, I think the answer is simpler. As the readers of criticism are already readers of literature, they do tend to relate to a specific kind of language or approach from a specific reviewer. That’s very common. And, much like there are more and less challenging books, so there are more and less sophisticated or cultured, or prepared, critics.
And here we get to the third part of the question: it seems to me that the most capable, the most brilliant and interesting critics are the ones who manage to articulate all kinds of books and authors without sticking to a specific niche. Clearly, that’s somewhat of a matter of personal taste. Critics such as Ricardo Piglia, for instance, recently deceased, and the aforementioned Susan Sontag, deal with an impressive amount of information. They articulate, reflect, question, and rarely take information for granted. Borges, too. Borges was a voracious reader. For those good readers, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of limit. Literature is, or was, to them, universal. Personally, I try to steer that way. I might add: that doesn’t mean that there aren’t movements, authors and languages with specific characteristics. But it’s a sort of choice, seeing literature as a whole.
Maíra Mendes Galvão is a Brazilian translator, editor, and poet and based in São Paulo. She is collaborating with Asymptote as Editor-at-large for Brazil.
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