Never-Ending Youth

$19.99

Never-Ending Youth is, in the words of writer/translator Eric A. Gordon, who contextualizes the book in his foreword, “a New World Bildungsroman in which a clutch of hungry and ambitious friends and comrades make the best of an untenable situation and survive to see better times.” Urariano Mota’s novel portrays the existential challenges confronting young people with passionate convictions at a time of class warfare and political upheaval in a continent-sized country which has been the staunchest South American ally and admirer of the United States since World War II. The book is a poignant and disturbing chronicle of our times.

Peter Lownds explains how and why he translated a recent Brazilian novel

SKU: 9780717800063
Author(s): Urariano Mota,
Barcode: 9780717800063 ISBN: 9780717800063

Description

Never-Ending Youth is a 21st-century reminder of the groundbreaking work of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Roberto Bolaños. It portrays the anxiety and exuberance of youth, the magnetism of home and culture in times of strife and suffering. Brazilian radical journalist and novelist Urariano Mota brings the heat, intensity, and perennial peril of Northeast Brazil to life in Peter Lownds’s vivid, annotated translation.

The plot unrolls in the streets, bars, beaches, and boarding houses of Recife and Olinda, Pernambuco, in the early 1970s, a time of undeclared civil war and internecine struggle when the clandestine activities of a group of friends and comrades defy the military dictatorship. Some perish while others survive to reflect on their fate.

The young rebels’ love for painting, poetry, music, and alcohol is challenged by a hasty indoctrination in Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist theory. They make impulsive decisions in precarious times with scant moral and material support, and those who survive attempt to reconcile their utopian past with their more comfortable existence a half century later when Jair Bolsonaro’s authoritarian regime reminds them that the struggle for social justice continues. Urariano Mota’s Never-Ending Youth is both a memoir and a paean to the survival of the revolutionary spirit.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/05/never-ending-youth-urariano-motas-novel-memoir-of-resistance-to-brazilian-fascism/

https://www.brasil247.com/ideias/a-mais-longa-duracao-da-juventude-o-romance-memoria-de-urariano-mota-sobre-a-resistencia-contra-o-fascismo-brasileiro

Additional information

Weight 12 oz
Dimensions 8.5 × 5.5 × 0.567 in
Author

Add a review

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *