4 Stars
This novel about domestic servitude in modern Brazil is a translation from Portuguese.
Mabel stays with her mother Eunice who works as a live-in maid for a very wealthy family. Mabel’s presence is merely tolerated; as a child she must stay in a small room at the back of the house assigned to her mother. When she is older, she is expected to help her mother, so the family actually has two servants for the price of one. Mabel is dissatisfied with the smallness of her life and she is motivated to work towards a better one.
Eunice is uneducated, has an alcoholic partner who takes her money, and has a daughter and an ailing mother dependent on her so she needs the job. As a consequence, she accepts exploitative working conditions. Workers like her are expected to be there whenever needed, “present without being,” but are treated “as though they’re invisible and disposable.” They are expected to be grateful “for receiving far less than . . . deserved during years of ceaseless dedication and work.” When tragedy strikes, Eunice must decide if she will be complicit and remain silent in face of the injustices meted out by the wealthy family she has served for years.
The book is divided into three parts; the first is narrated by Mabel, the second by Eunice, and the third by a non-human narrator. In the first two sections, it’s interesting to see the contrast between daughter and mother. Whereas Eunice accepts silent servitude, Mabel resents the unfair treatment she and her mother receive and she rebels; in fact, when Mr. Tiago smirks at hearing Mabel say she wants to become a doctor, she uses his scorn as further motivation. The third narrator ties together all the novel’s themes.
Throughout the novel, the author uses a unifying metaphor: she compares the smallness of a maid’s room to the small lives of those forced to live in one. Mabel comments that “for those who weren’t residents [in the luxury apartment building], everything was little: little-room, little-apartment, little-bathroom . . .” In essence they live in “A prison, a place meant to separate these lives from the world and from the other residents.” Mabel and the doorman’s son João Pedro want to escape from what is perfectly described as a “jail of the soul.”
There is a sharp contrast between the wealthy employers and their employees. The wealthy can use their money to make happen what is impossible for the poor. Mabel observes, “People like us needed to calculate every step with precision or our lives could derail forever.” She, for instance, has a problem also faced by a rich girl, but whereas the rich girl solves it easily, Mabel has difficulty solving it on her own.
Mabel and others like her are labelled as non-children, people who “don’t have the right to childhood.” Eunice mentions, “A good servant is silent; a child who is the servant’s daughter must be as well. She can’t laugh like a child, she can’t jump or play like a child. She isn’t a child.” Mabel and others like her “never had the chance to slip up in the one phase of life when it should be the most natural to.” The doorman of the building wants his son to know that “anything good he might do would go unseen, and anything bad would make him the easiest one to blame.”
I was aware that Brazil has one of the highest levels of income inequality globally and that its society is marked by significant racial inequalities, but this novel delivers that information in an emotionally impactful way. I recommend it to anyone wanting to more fully understand Brazil’s racial and class imbalances.
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
No comments:
Post a Comment