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After Life

An Ethnographic Novel

Tobias Hecht author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:5th Apr '06

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

After Life cover

An ethnographic novel based on anthropologist Tobia Hecht's more than ten years of interviews with Bruna Verissimo, a youth from the hardscrabble streets of Recife, in northeast Brazil

Bruna Veríssimo, a youth from the hardscrabble streets of Recife, in Northeast Brazil, spoke with Tobias Hecht over the course of many years, reliving her early childhood in a raging and destitute home, her initiation into the world of prostitution at a time when her contemporaries had scarcely started school, and her coming of age against all odds.

Hecht had originally intended to write a biography of Veríssimo. But with interviews ultimately spanning a decade, he couldn't ignore that much of what he had been told wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. In Veríssimo’s recounting of her life, a sister who had never been born died tragically, while the very same rape that shattered the body and mind of an acquaintance occurred a second time, only with a different victim and several years later. At night, with the anthropologist’s tape recorder in hand, she became her own ethnographer, inventing informants, interviewing herself, and answering in distinct voices.

With truth impossible to disentangle from invention, Hecht followed the lead of Veríssimo, his would-be informant, creating characters, rendering a tale that didn’t happen but that might have, probing at what it means to translate a life into words.

A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.

After Life is not only deeply moving, but written with profound integrity. It is saturated with compassion and in this lies its intense moral power.”—Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces
“A disturbingly powerful journey into the violence of everyday life and the inner world of literature. The enigmatic and courageous characters of After Life jump off the page and change the ways we think about human agency today.”—João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
After Life engages a startling mix of ethnography and fiction to illuminate both the world of Recife’s homeless and the peculiar ennui that often befalls the anthropologist during extended fieldwork. . . . Remarkable. . . . After Life urges us to consider, more deeply than we have before, alternative modes of representation.” -- Robin E. Sheriff * Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *
“A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.” * Adolescence *

ISBN: 9780822337508

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 417g

192 pages