Avalovara by Osman Lins

First published: 1973 (English translation, 1980)

Type of plot: Existential quest

Time of work: 200 b.c.e., 1908-1940, and 1938-1970

Locale: Pompeii, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, England, São Paulo, Recife, and Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Principal Characters:

• Abel, the protagonist, a Brazilian writer in his early thirties
• Anneliese Roos, his German lover
• Cecilia, his Brazilian lover in Recife
• >O<, his Brazilian lover in São Paulo
• Publius Ubonius, a Pompeiian businessman
• Loreius, a slave of Publius Ubonius
• Julius Heckethorn, a German clockmaker
• Olavo Hayano, the husband of >O<

The Novel

The structure of Osman Lins’s Avalovara is at once astonishingly complex and altogether transparent. The sequence of events is predetermined by a geometric design which appears before the first page of text, consisting of a Latin palindrome of five five-letter words with a spiral superimposed on it. To visualize this palindrome here, draw a large square subdivided into twenty-five smaller squares—five across and five down. In the first row of squares place the letters S-A-T-O-R; in the second, A-R-E-P-O; in the third, T-E-N-E-T; in the fourth, O-P-E-R-A; and in the fifth, R-O-T-A-S. The entire square is centered over a fourteen-ring spiral.

Each letter of the palindrome represents one plot line, and when the spiral touches a letter, a passage of that plot line appears. Since some letters are more frequent than others, plot segments vary in number of episodes from twenty-four (letter “O”) to two (letter “N,” which is in the center of the design). In addition, episodes increase in length each time that particular plot line reappears—most are ten lines long in the first episode, twenty lines long in the second, and so on. Exceptions are the themes corresponding to the letters “P” and “T,” whose first episodes are twelve and twenty lines long, respectively.

Such a contrived structure would make Avalovara’s plot seem to be an extremely easy one to recount, but in fact the reading experience is nearly impossible to describe, because the reader is simultaneously witnessing a dazzling display of literary legerdemain and being led in and out of eight very different but interrelated plot lines. Plots of such visible artifice often turn out to be admirable failures, but Lins never sacrifices his fiction to the contrivances that order its unfolding, and the novel betrays none of the self-centeredness many cleverly concocted novels have.

Though there are eight plot divisions, six of them involve the protagonist Abel directly, two dealing with his love affairs with Roos (largely set in Europe) and Cecilia (largely set in Recife). The other four are all in some way concerned with the enigmatic >O<, with whom Abel lives a consuming passion and in whose arms he dies, at the hands of Olavo Hayano. One of the other remaining plot lines deals with the Pompeiian Publius Ubonius, who offers to free his slave Loreius if the slave can construct a magic sentence which reflects the mobility of the universe and the immutability of the divine. The sentence Loreius invents is “Sator arepo tenet opera rotas” (“The farmer carefully maintains his plow in the furrows”); the square in which it lies is space; the spiral superimposed on it is time. The final subplot is the story of the obsessed clockmaker Julius Heckethorn, who early in the twentieth century attempts to devise a clock unencumbered by the bothersome ticks of ordinary clocks. He abandons the scheme but does design a clock with a complex triple sound system which will some day play Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in F Minor.

As the reader approaches the end of the book, the spiral approaches the center of the square, and the various narratives, separated in time and space, draw together as Abel approaches something like an erotic transcendence in the arms of his mysterious and oddly polymorphous lover. The moment of this epiphany coincides with the beginning of a solar eclipse, which is precisely the second that the intricate clock, now in the same room with Abel, begins the sonata.

The Characters

Each of the characters in Avalovara is identified with a particular notion, either abstract or concrete, which contributes to an understanding of the character in the context of the whole. Abel’s German lover Roos, for example, is identified with cities, and part of her function appears to be to suggest the mobility, even random movement, of people and objects in the space of the cosmos. Cecilia, his first Brazilian lover, is identified with a series of animals but has as a salient characteristic not some animal trait but a complex of non-traits, which contribute to her ambiguity—she is neither woman nor animal, woman nor man, and she is surrounded by characters who similarly have interchangeable or indeterminate names. Abel himself is most clearly identified with water, a traditional symbol of some richness, but he is the seeker of truth, not an embodiment of it. Undoubtedly the most interesting, and the most difficult, character is >O<, a woman “twice-born” whose behavior makes her seem more mythic than human but who is at the same time the object of Abel’s almost hallucinatory erotic obsession. Even Olavo Hayano, who is important in the action only at the climax and who remains a sketchy figure throughout, is likely to be associated in the reader’s mind with the “Yolyp,” an imaginary creature of great destructive power.

Avalovara is not really a character here, but it is most closely associated with >O<, and many of its attributes are hers. The name derives from the Buddhist Avalokitesvara, a male Bodhisattva, one who has attained enlightenment but who postpones Nirvana in order to help others attain enlightenment. >O< is not only magical but also double, because there is within her another set of eyes, another life, another self.

One of the most interesting characterization devices in Avalovara is found in the use of names. Novelists have long used suggestive names to hint at the configuration of soul of a character, but Lins seems to have been determined to force readers into a more active role in determining a character’s goodness or badness. Most of the principal characters here have no last name—one of the two principals has no name at all, but rather a symbol.

Critical Context

Osman Lins published his first novel, O visitante, in 1955, and his second, O fiel e a pedra, in 1961. His first novel won for him several literary prizes, and two of his books of short stories, Os gestos (1957) and Nove, novena (1966), contributed substantially to his reputation as a serious and very talented writer. His works also enjoyed notable success abroad, especially the French translation of Nove, novena. Avalovara itself was ready for publication in Italian, French, and German before the Brazilian edition appeared.

Lins has not been a “popular” writer in Brazil because his works are all, like Avalovara, intellectually and philosophically challenging. He does, however, have a solid reputation as one of Brazil’s most accomplished, as well as one of its most difficult, authors. Avalovara is legitimately regarded as the culmination of a brilliant writer’s career. Though he published one more novel before his death in 1978, Avalovara had obviously been germinating in its author’s mind for some time, since some tentative suggestions of it appeared in earlier works, notably the short stories. Brazilian critics have consistently admired his works, though there have been reservations expressed about some of his technical innovations, occasionally so complex as to produce not much more than perplexity in his readers.

Consistent with such perplexities, Avalovara can be seen as belonging to two important but apparently contradictory literary traditions: apocalyptic fiction and Utopian fiction. It is in some ways comparable to such apocalyptic works as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)—there is even a symbolically suggestive Nike rocket launch in Avalovara, reminiscent of Pynchon’s symbolic V-2’s—but it also fits into the more established Utopian tradition. What is unusual about Avalovara is that it presents the apocalypse as the means of achieving the utopian state.

Avalovara is also a distinguished example of yet another literary fashion, one which has had particular importance in the twentieth century: the self-referential novel. In fact, it is so intensely self-referential that some are reluctant to call it a novel at all, preferring to see it more as a tour de force of fiction about writing fiction than as a story about characters. There is some validity to this point, since few novels obey such a rigid and elaborate predetermined structure, but the only episodes which belabor this premeditation are the sections of the geometric design itself (the ten episodes corresponding to the letter “S”), and the rest of the stories are so densely evocative and so symbolically suggestive that readers become so involved as to overlook the artifice. Even those who do not are likely to remember Avalovara as an incomparable reading experience.

Bibliography

Frizzi, Adria. “Osman Lins: An Introduction.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 15 (Fall, 1995): 155-160. An excellent presentation of Lins and his work. Frizzi notes that Lins was the “epitome of an outsider” and that although his experiments in narration and textual time and space sometimes make his works difficult to understand, they are not inaccessible.

Ladiera, Julieta Goloy. “Osman Lins: Crossing Frontiers.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 15 (Fall, 1995): 186-195. Ladiera discusses the power of literature to cross, even transcend, borders. She examines Lins’s fiction from this perspective, showing how his work surmounts cultural and social boundaries by means of ideas.

Scliar, Moacyr. “Living on Literature or for Literature?” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 15 (Fall, 1995): 196-197. Offers insight into Lins’s career and his struggle to succeed as a writer in spite of the political, economic, and cultural crisis in his native Brazil. Although living conditions were at times harsh, the greater challenge for Lins was to develop his craft.

Simas, Rosa. Circularity and Visions of the New World in William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, and Osman Lins. Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. A perceptive series of essays, exploring the common themes and visions of three great writers. Includes an essay devoted to Avalovara.

West, Paul. “Osman Lins’s Avalovara.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 15 (Fall, 1995): 208-210. West analyzes the style of Lins’s novel, noting that the text is dense, uses the structure of a palindrome, and incorporates visual signifiers. West also addresses the symbolism of the characters, particularly Abel’s mistress.