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Bandoleros
Um brasileiro e um americano envolvem-se em um relacionamento obsessivo e violento. Narrado em primeira pessoa. a prosa de Gilberto Noll busca o essencial. "Começo a descer o morro. Viro a cabeça e olho ainda uma vez. O corpo. puro sangue banhado numa mecha de sol. Isso mesmo: uma mecha de sol no deserto noturno. Uma única mecha de sol banhando o corpo de Steve. Esfrego os olhos. mas é isso mesmo: Steve banhado por um spot celeste no negro deserto de pedras. Steve me olha. Mas ele não tem mais olhos. Cada órbita uma poça de sangue. O spot é suficientemente amplo para pegar um pouco de solo ensangüentado em volta. Vejo que. pouco a pouco. sob o efeito da mecha de sol. aquele sangue todo começa a se reter e a coagular-se. Steve parece agora incorporado às pedras. Um acidente vermelho do solo. "
183 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
About the author
João Gilberto Noll
26 books40 followersJoão Gilberto Noll was a Brazilian writer born in Porto Alegre, in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
His early years were spent studying at the Catholic Colégio São Pedro. In 1967 he began university coursework in literature at the UFRGS-Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, but in 1969 he interrupted his studies to pursue a career as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro, working for the newspapers Folha da Manhã and Última Hora. In 1970 Noll spent a year in São Paulo working as a copyeditor at the publishing house Editora Nacional, but a year later he moved back to Rio and resumed both his work in journalism at Última Hora, writing on literature, theater and music, and his university studies in literature, first at the Faculdade Notre Dame and then at the PUC-Rio, where he received his degree in 1979.
Noll published his first short story as part of a 1970 Porto Alegre anthology entitled Roda de Fogo, but his more formal literary debut came in 1980 when his first book of short stories O cego e a dançarina (English title: The blind man and the dancer) was released, for which he received three literary prizes. One of Noll's short stories from O cego e a dançarina, Alguma coisa urgentemente (Something urgent), was the basis for the film Nunca fomos tão felizes (English title: We've Never Been So Happy) in 1983, directed by Murilo Salles and starring the actor Claudio Marzo.
Noll received early international attention as a participant in the Writer's Program at the University of Iowa in 1982, and when his work appeared in an anthology of new Brazilian writers published in Germany in 1983. After a short visit to the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, he was invited to teach Brazilian literature there in 1997. He was an invited scholar for a Rockefeller Foundation seminar in Bellagio, Italy, was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and spent a two-month writing residency at the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture & Society at King's College London in 2004. All of these experiences were to shape the subject matter of later works.
His first collection of stories was followed by the novels A fúria do corpo (1981), Bandoleiros (1985) and Rastros do Verão (1986). Two of his subsequent and perhaps best-known works, the novels Hotel Atlantico (1989) and Harmada (1993), later came out in a 1997 English edition, translated by David Treece and published by Boulevard Books in London. Another novel, entitled O quieto animal da esquina, appeared in 1991.
From 1998 to 2001 Noll published a twice-weekly series of short stories in the major São Paulo daily Folha de São Paulo, and in 2004 he began to publish longer stories every two weeks in the daily Correio Braziliense published in the federal capital Brasília.
His early years were spent studying at the Catholic Colégio São Pedro. In 1967 he began university coursework in literature at the UFRGS-Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, but in 1969 he interrupted his studies to pursue a career as a journalist in Rio de Janeiro, working for the newspapers Folha da Manhã and Última Hora. In 1970 Noll spent a year in São Paulo working as a copyeditor at the publishing house Editora Nacional, but a year later he moved back to Rio and resumed both his work in journalism at Última Hora, writing on literature, theater and music, and his university studies in literature, first at the Faculdade Notre Dame and then at the PUC-Rio, where he received his degree in 1979.
Noll published his first short story as part of a 1970 Porto Alegre anthology entitled Roda de Fogo, but his more formal literary debut came in 1980 when his first book of short stories O cego e a dançarina (English title: The blind man and the dancer) was released, for which he received three literary prizes. One of Noll's short stories from O cego e a dançarina, Alguma coisa urgentemente (Something urgent), was the basis for the film Nunca fomos tão felizes (English title: We've Never Been So Happy) in 1983, directed by Murilo Salles and starring the actor Claudio Marzo.
Noll received early international attention as a participant in the Writer's Program at the University of Iowa in 1982, and when his work appeared in an anthology of new Brazilian writers published in Germany in 1983. After a short visit to the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, he was invited to teach Brazilian literature there in 1997. He was an invited scholar for a Rockefeller Foundation seminar in Bellagio, Italy, was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, and spent a two-month writing residency at the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture & Society at King's College London in 2004. All of these experiences were to shape the subject matter of later works.
His first collection of stories was followed by the novels A fúria do corpo (1981), Bandoleiros (1985) and Rastros do Verão (1986). Two of his subsequent and perhaps best-known works, the novels Hotel Atlantico (1989) and Harmada (1993), later came out in a 1997 English edition, translated by David Treece and published by Boulevard Books in London. Another novel, entitled O quieto animal da esquina, appeared in 1991.
From 1998 to 2001 Noll published a twice-weekly series of short stories in the major São Paulo daily Folha de São Paulo, and in 2004 he began to publish longer stories every two weeks in the daily Correio Braziliense published in the federal capital Brasília.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 24, 2017
Un libro extraordinario. El relato de viaje de un escritor que vive en la dimensión literaria funciona como pretexto para que la voz narrativa pesquise lo imposible: la experiencia. Hay una súbita partida desde el Brasil, una estadía en Estados Unidos, un regreso al Brasil. Hay unos pocos personajes que se dispersan como vectores euclidianos desde un punto tridimensional cero, cero, cero, la voz del narrador. Hay un personaje enfermo. Hay dolor, violencia, muerte, sexo, locura. Si bien Bandoleros es una novela corta, su lectura es extenuante. Su estilo es claramente experimental. Los cambios de registro, de sintaxis, de sonido, todo se articula en un efecto de rotunda perplejidad. El estado neuroléptico que produce este libro creo que se relaciona con la inmersión de la narración en el inconsciente. Aunque Freud y muchos siglos antes los griegos nos dejaron en claro que la experiencia humana es casi totalmente inconsciente, aún hoy nos desconcierta lo siniestro que surge cuando se afloja sólo un poco el control consciente. Aparecen la sexualidad y la muerte según el oráculo freudiano y el infierno del lenguaje según oráculos posteriores. Bandoleros puede leerse como un viaje a ninguna parte seguido del regreso a un punto de partida imposible: lo inefable de la experiencia humana. Es por eso que la narración se mueve en niveles altos de abstracción, al modo de Beckett, con voces que no se sabe dónde resuenan ni de dónde provienen. Sin embargo, la perseverancia de Noll en la elaboración de lo concreto, de lo material, de lo sensorial, de lo corporal, también es ubicua en Bandoleros. Esta tensión entre los polos de lo abstracto y lo concreto no es contradictoria sino que es una buena vía literaria de acceso al mismo problema estético y ontológico, quizás el máximo problema descubierto por el ser humano.
April 24, 2017
Estranho, estranhíssimo. Entre a vigília e o sono e o álcool. Em um dos últimos momentos do livro, no vertiginoso beijo entre o narrador e Jill, eu quis que o livro não acabasse. Talvez eu tenha gostado mais do que agora eu sei, ou talvez tenha gostado menos; espero o tempo.
May 25, 2026
A Brazilian writer in Porto Alegre, whose last novel, Sol macabro, sold zero copies while a few critics praised it lavishly (a cruelty he registers with professional bitterness), opens "Bandoleiros" already defeated. His companion João is dying of a mysterious nerve disease that makes the body obsolete, his marriage to Ada has dissolved in mutual masturbation, Minimal Society ideology, and the arrival of a Kenyan delegate named Mary with world-historical opinions and magnificent breasts. A drunk American keeps calling the apartment at dawn in incomprehensible English. The one clear phrase: "I will be there this afternoon."
The writer, who has worn the same clothes for a month straight, steps outside and spends his Sunday drinking dreher, colliding with a suicidal young poet from Brasília who considers him a god, and ends up following Steve, a tattooed, amnesiac, revolver-owning American with a sinking blue Buick in his yard, across a sun-baked valley outside the city to a rotting wooden house.
Steve, son of a former U.S. consul and a Brazilian stepmother named Graça who preserves orchid petals in chemical fixatives and sells her paintings in Boston, had half his memory erased by insulin-shock therapy after Harvard. He fills every available hour recounting his catastrophically failed marriage to Jill, his friendship with Baby Buffalo (an albino rapist from Vermont who tamed a buffalo at age three by running his hand along its back while it closed its eyes), and his mother's suicide in a bed of daisies in Porto Alegre's Moinhos de Vento neighborhood.
Ada, the writer's soon-to-be-ex-wife and credentialed sociologist, had decamped to Boston University on a scholarship to study the Minimal Society. A utopian scheme with 250,000 signatories, poets quarantined in dark cells with alcohol and hallucinogens to compose death-poetry for the entire community, and a comprehensive ban on witnessing other people sleep. Ada shares her Beacon Hill apartment with Alicia, an ardent Mexican heiress who speaks French exclusively out of anti-hybridist principle and regards the writer with a hostility that expresses itself as perfect silence, and Mary, an enormous Kenyan conference delegate who spends hours describing a snowy Boston street to the writer in elaborate, sorrowful detail, convinced he is blind from birth.
The writer, expelled from the apartment for playing Bob Dylan at breakfast, spends his last Boston morning drinking at the Peter bar on Charles Street, two blocks from the women who hate him, before following Steve to a decrepit country house in the snow, where Jill, Steve's red-haired obstetrician wife, arrives through the kitchen door in a purple shawl, and the writer gives her a kiss so long and so complete that, inside it, he discovers with total certainty that life is worthless.
I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t see why I had to…
João Gilberto Noll (1946-2017) was a Gaúcho writer from Porto Alegre, a deeply unsettling prose voice who spent his life producing slim, airless books about men dissolving at the edges of their own stories. Bandoleiros (1985) is his second novel.
The book's central preoccupation is sex, death, and ideology, and how thoroughly all three fail to fill an afternoon. It is the terror of having zero tasks remaining. Every character carries this condition like a second passport. Steve with his insulin-wrecked memory, Ada with her Minimal utopia, the young suicidal poet with his performance ketchup, a blind saxophonist alone in his pensão counting three factors of existence (street, bathroom, room) and finding them sufficient. Noll seems to suggest that modernity produces people with all exits clearly marked and all of them locked.
Noll doesn’t always mark shifts in time, place, or perspective, so you get these ghostly overlaps. Everyone, even memory, lives outside the law of chronology.
The sentences hit quick and final, each one a stone dropped in water. For me the humor sits inside the ache, the ache inside the joke, until the book leaves me stranded at the same edge as the narrator, waiting for a horizon that keeps receding.
The title Bandoleiros פושטקים means bandits or outlaws. The word suggests drifters who live outside of law, society, or home. In the book, the narrator never actually joins a gang of literal bandits, but the whole life he describes feels outlawed: no family, no stable work, no rooted identity. He drifts through apartments, buses, bars, bedrooms, and valleys the way a bandit might drift through frontier land. Every person he meets lives on the edge of belonging, a spiritual exile, a cast out or self-exiled.
I think the book carries some strong scenes, some black comedy, and some startling images: “my whole body shaking until they carried me inside,” or the coffin crossing the valley at dusk. But it also meanders.
Noll writes in bursts, like journal fragments strung together. That style creates a raw immediacy but also makes the story feel loose and uneven. Some moments bite hard, others feel recycled or undercooked. To me it reads more like sketches of ruin than a complete novel. I’d call it interesting, even strange, but not fully satisfying.
About three stars. It isn’t bad, it isn’t great. It sits in that middle ground. Sometimes gripping, sometimes sloppy, sometimes beautiful, sometimes thin. It leaves an impression of drift and exile, but also leaves me wishing the book itself carried more weight or coherence.
❤️ 🇮🇱
The writer, who has worn the same clothes for a month straight, steps outside and spends his Sunday drinking dreher, colliding with a suicidal young poet from Brasília who considers him a god, and ends up following Steve, a tattooed, amnesiac, revolver-owning American with a sinking blue Buick in his yard, across a sun-baked valley outside the city to a rotting wooden house.
Steve, son of a former U.S. consul and a Brazilian stepmother named Graça who preserves orchid petals in chemical fixatives and sells her paintings in Boston, had half his memory erased by insulin-shock therapy after Harvard. He fills every available hour recounting his catastrophically failed marriage to Jill, his friendship with Baby Buffalo (an albino rapist from Vermont who tamed a buffalo at age three by running his hand along its back while it closed its eyes), and his mother's suicide in a bed of daisies in Porto Alegre's Moinhos de Vento neighborhood.
Ada, the writer's soon-to-be-ex-wife and credentialed sociologist, had decamped to Boston University on a scholarship to study the Minimal Society. A utopian scheme with 250,000 signatories, poets quarantined in dark cells with alcohol and hallucinogens to compose death-poetry for the entire community, and a comprehensive ban on witnessing other people sleep. Ada shares her Beacon Hill apartment with Alicia, an ardent Mexican heiress who speaks French exclusively out of anti-hybridist principle and regards the writer with a hostility that expresses itself as perfect silence, and Mary, an enormous Kenyan conference delegate who spends hours describing a snowy Boston street to the writer in elaborate, sorrowful detail, convinced he is blind from birth.
The writer, expelled from the apartment for playing Bob Dylan at breakfast, spends his last Boston morning drinking at the Peter bar on Charles Street, two blocks from the women who hate him, before following Steve to a decrepit country house in the snow, where Jill, Steve's red-haired obstetrician wife, arrives through the kitchen door in a purple shawl, and the writer gives her a kiss so long and so complete that, inside it, he discovers with total certainty that life is worthless.
I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t see why I had to…
João Gilberto Noll (1946-2017) was a Gaúcho writer from Porto Alegre, a deeply unsettling prose voice who spent his life producing slim, airless books about men dissolving at the edges of their own stories. Bandoleiros (1985) is his second novel.
The book's central preoccupation is sex, death, and ideology, and how thoroughly all three fail to fill an afternoon. It is the terror of having zero tasks remaining. Every character carries this condition like a second passport. Steve with his insulin-wrecked memory, Ada with her Minimal utopia, the young suicidal poet with his performance ketchup, a blind saxophonist alone in his pensão counting three factors of existence (street, bathroom, room) and finding them sufficient. Noll seems to suggest that modernity produces people with all exits clearly marked and all of them locked.
Noll doesn’t always mark shifts in time, place, or perspective, so you get these ghostly overlaps. Everyone, even memory, lives outside the law of chronology.
The sentences hit quick and final, each one a stone dropped in water. For me the humor sits inside the ache, the ache inside the joke, until the book leaves me stranded at the same edge as the narrator, waiting for a horizon that keeps receding.
The title Bandoleiros פושטקים means bandits or outlaws. The word suggests drifters who live outside of law, society, or home. In the book, the narrator never actually joins a gang of literal bandits, but the whole life he describes feels outlawed: no family, no stable work, no rooted identity. He drifts through apartments, buses, bars, bedrooms, and valleys the way a bandit might drift through frontier land. Every person he meets lives on the edge of belonging, a spiritual exile, a cast out or self-exiled.
I think the book carries some strong scenes, some black comedy, and some startling images: “my whole body shaking until they carried me inside,” or the coffin crossing the valley at dusk. But it also meanders.
Noll writes in bursts, like journal fragments strung together. That style creates a raw immediacy but also makes the story feel loose and uneven. Some moments bite hard, others feel recycled or undercooked. To me it reads more like sketches of ruin than a complete novel. I’d call it interesting, even strange, but not fully satisfying.
About three stars. It isn’t bad, it isn’t great. It sits in that middle ground. Sometimes gripping, sometimes sloppy, sometimes beautiful, sometimes thin. It leaves an impression of drift and exile, but also leaves me wishing the book itself carried more weight or coherence.
❤️ 🇮🇱
April 27, 2019
Una sorpresa este libro. Lo tenía en el programa de Lit. Brasileña y recién ahora lo leo.
Lynch meets Sartre?
Un escritor en la más absoluta decadencia tiene la necesidad imperiosa de salir. El viaje, es más bien corto. Se emborracha, ve algunos personajes extraños, se encuentra con un viejo conocido y pasan cosas.
Mientras tanto, la narración pasa por los recuerdos del poeta, de Boston a Brasil y una serie de relatos paralelos que, si bien no son iguales, se asemejan. Ada en Boston, Ada en Brasil. Steve en Boston, Steve en Brasil. La nuca, la sangre, la memoria, el grito, el sueño.
La narración no es lineal, hay saltos temporales y también de temática; hay personajes que toman el hilo de la historia, lo pasean. Eso está muy bien.
Hay experimentación. Pero no surreal.
Aunque es una novela que requiere de algo de atención y también algo de fe.
“Pobre bloque de carne, pensé: Solo tiene la repetición”.
Cual es el referente de la Sociedad Minimalista? O es una alegoría de la técnica narrativa, de estas historias como cajas chinas.
Lynch meets Sartre?
Un escritor en la más absoluta decadencia tiene la necesidad imperiosa de salir. El viaje, es más bien corto. Se emborracha, ve algunos personajes extraños, se encuentra con un viejo conocido y pasan cosas.
Mientras tanto, la narración pasa por los recuerdos del poeta, de Boston a Brasil y una serie de relatos paralelos que, si bien no son iguales, se asemejan. Ada en Boston, Ada en Brasil. Steve en Boston, Steve en Brasil. La nuca, la sangre, la memoria, el grito, el sueño.
La narración no es lineal, hay saltos temporales y también de temática; hay personajes que toman el hilo de la historia, lo pasean. Eso está muy bien.
Hay experimentación. Pero no surreal.
Aunque es una novela que requiere de algo de atención y también algo de fe.
“Pobre bloque de carne, pensé: Solo tiene la repetición”.
Cual es el referente de la Sociedad Minimalista? O es una alegoría de la técnica narrativa, de estas historias como cajas chinas.
February 16, 2021
Bandoleiros has an engaging narrative, very well written and developed by Noll and, in my opinion, can be described as spiraling vertiginous.
We are introduced to a totally unreliable narrator, revisiting his memories after a Sunday of cheap brandy drinking. You do not know what is real, or what can be a delusion or even a wish that has not come true ... everything gets mixed up and mixed, in addition to bringing moments that border the flow of thought.
There are good reflections about the human nature, and there are musical references like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Caetano Veloso. And despite the frantic pace and violence to which we are often exposed in the course of the narrative, the ending is beautiful, sublime and delicate. A amazing book! João Gilberto Noll should be more recognized in Brazilian literature.
We are introduced to a totally unreliable narrator, revisiting his memories after a Sunday of cheap brandy drinking. You do not know what is real, or what can be a delusion or even a wish that has not come true ... everything gets mixed up and mixed, in addition to bringing moments that border the flow of thought.
There are good reflections about the human nature, and there are musical references like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Caetano Veloso. And despite the frantic pace and violence to which we are often exposed in the course of the narrative, the ending is beautiful, sublime and delicate. A amazing book! João Gilberto Noll should be more recognized in Brazilian literature.
June 17, 2022
excepcional
September 23, 2025
não gostei da temática nem da forma
September 20, 2023
Muito bom, um dos meus favoritos. Engraçadíssimo e melancólico.
Me chamou a atenção as diversas imagens que remetem a desconexão, um protagonista e seu abscesso no pensamento que o ocupa o tempo todo e lhe tira o interesse das coisas. A trama vai avançando de uma maneira vaga, um personagem vagando em um domingo que ele nem sabia que era domingo, tentando "sair da jogada", não fazer nada: bebe dreher, encontra poetas suicidas, saxofonistas cegos, mães cantoras e ônibus que o chamam para uma cidade deserta vizinha e de repente ele está lá, em Viamão preso com um gringo que não para de falar, um gringo desmemoriado, para logo começar a nos contar da sociedade-seita Minimal utópica de sua ex-mulher. A desconexão parece estar presente em todos personagens, sua esposa Ada e sua sociedade minimal e perfeita aparte do mundo sujo e desorganizado, o gringo sem memória, disfuncional, isolado da sociedade e, por fim, o protagonista, vagando por aí, deixado para trás pelo fluxo da história e rondado pelo fim por todos lados, do casamento, de seu livro fracassado, da morte de seu amigo: um personagem que não está em nenhuma geografia, que se identifica com o não-lugar do aeroporto, arrastando uma mala inútil sem ver a curva e a saída do Galeão, separado por um vidro das coisas que ama e morrem. O livro deixa um montão de pontas abertas, personagens que só são introduzidos, eventos aleatórios, conexões pouco verosímeis, mortes que não sabemos se são reais, os romances do Noll têm essa característica de um fluxo de acontecimentos conectados ao acaso, como um improviso de jazz (como ele diz), algo um pouco onírico olhando de fora mas que se sustenta nos livros de forma convincente. Aqui em bandoleiros (errância, vagabundos, andeantes) o fio que conecta tudo parece ser justamente a desconexão, a perda de identidade, sentido, de rumo, de interesse por um mundo muito frio ou muito quente que avança descontroladamente, atropelando seus personagens ridículos e suicidas.
Me chamou a atenção as diversas imagens que remetem a desconexão, um protagonista e seu abscesso no pensamento que o ocupa o tempo todo e lhe tira o interesse das coisas. A trama vai avançando de uma maneira vaga, um personagem vagando em um domingo que ele nem sabia que era domingo, tentando "sair da jogada", não fazer nada: bebe dreher, encontra poetas suicidas, saxofonistas cegos, mães cantoras e ônibus que o chamam para uma cidade deserta vizinha e de repente ele está lá, em Viamão preso com um gringo que não para de falar, um gringo desmemoriado, para logo começar a nos contar da sociedade-seita Minimal utópica de sua ex-mulher. A desconexão parece estar presente em todos personagens, sua esposa Ada e sua sociedade minimal e perfeita aparte do mundo sujo e desorganizado, o gringo sem memória, disfuncional, isolado da sociedade e, por fim, o protagonista, vagando por aí, deixado para trás pelo fluxo da história e rondado pelo fim por todos lados, do casamento, de seu livro fracassado, da morte de seu amigo: um personagem que não está em nenhuma geografia, que se identifica com o não-lugar do aeroporto, arrastando uma mala inútil sem ver a curva e a saída do Galeão, separado por um vidro das coisas que ama e morrem. O livro deixa um montão de pontas abertas, personagens que só são introduzidos, eventos aleatórios, conexões pouco verosímeis, mortes que não sabemos se são reais, os romances do Noll têm essa característica de um fluxo de acontecimentos conectados ao acaso, como um improviso de jazz (como ele diz), algo um pouco onírico olhando de fora mas que se sustenta nos livros de forma convincente. Aqui em bandoleiros (errância, vagabundos, andeantes) o fio que conecta tudo parece ser justamente a desconexão, a perda de identidade, sentido, de rumo, de interesse por um mundo muito frio ou muito quente que avança descontroladamente, atropelando seus personagens ridículos e suicidas.
April 20, 2025
אלבר קאמי הטוב יותר
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews