Brazil's Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

The fifth of Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza's Rio de Janeiro crime novels featuring Chief Espinoza is now in English--a good occasion to review the whole series (The Silence of the Rain, December Heat, Southwesterly Wind, and A Window in Copacabana). On the face of it, this is a series I should like--even want to like. The setting is exotic and interesting, and there are the elements of noir (a bleak portrait of modern life in general and the particular setting, corruption in the police force, jarring crimes, poverty and despair). Plus the tone is fairly light (given the material), allowing for a certain dry comedy. But I just can't seem to get into the series--they are not novels I can easily imagine going back to again and again, as I would do for some other series. The plots are intricate and turn on believable events that are integrated into the society in which they happen. In fact the plots are the main interest of the series, because there is little character or interaction among characters. Espinoza is a writer's idea of a policeman--he's obsessed with books (his no bookcase bookcase--made entirely of books--is a feature in all the books). He cares little about what he eats but the novelist is careful to talk about what he's eating--and since Espinoza is not all that particular, the meals are usually pretty boring (in contrast, for example, to the meals of the main characters in the novels of Spain's Montalban or Italy's Camilleri). None of the other characters have much personality, other than a few colorful characteristics. The other cops are either routinely corrupt or, in the case of Espinoza's few trusted lieutenants, simply not corrupt--they have no other personality (though Garcia-Roza does give them little snippets of life outside their work). The text is very "narrated," rather than growing integrally out of the setting or the characters. Garcia-Roza is present in every word. I've been tempted to refer to the novels as like Doyle's, since there is a puzzle character (but no similarity in methods between Holmes and Espinoza). The novels seem almost parable-like--tempting me to compare them to Kafka (though the tone is much lighter in Garcia-Roza). I think perhaps they are simply too self-consciously literary, as are the novels of, for example, Cuba's Leonardo Padura, whose detective is a frustrated writer--but Padura's novels are full of telling detail about life in Havana, life in Cuba, life in the modern world. And the characters are (though in some ways just as cipher-like as Garcia-Roza's) colorful in interesting and believable ways, ways that further the stories. In the end, I still want to like Garcia-Roza's novels and will probably look at any new ones (in the library--I don't think I'll buy them any more), but I don't find myself wishing that the translator would hurry up...