A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar review – from lust to rage to howling despair

No, I hadn’t heard of him, and unless you are up on modernist Brazilian literature you probably won’t have either. This, along with the novel Ancient Tillage, also published in Penguin Modern Classics, is the first time Raduan Nassar has been translated into English, in this country at least.

A Cup of Rage is a burning coal of a work, superbly translated by Stefan Tobler. You may consider a book this short to be scarcely worthy of the name, but it packs more power into its scant 47 pages than most books do into five or 10 times as many. Each of its seven chapters comes not only as an unbroken paragraph but as a single sentence: you have to read carefully to keep track, and once you have finished you will want to read it again. The writing is chewy – dense, tough, but well worth the effort.

In bald paraphrase, the plot seems almost bathetic. A man, living in the countryside, has a younger female lover. They have sex; they get up early and shower; he sees that leaf-cutter ants have carved a gap into his privet hedge, which makes him furious; then they have a massive and quite extraordinary argument, and she drives off.

That is the storyline, stripped to its bones. How it is told, though, is another matter entirely. Apart from the last page, everything we read is the internal thought process of the man, working from lust to rage to howling despair: an iron-hard jet of fury, as the style dictates, and reminiscent of the Austrian master of vituperative, Thomas Bernhard. Nassar had a small literary output of just two books, but he was also a successful journalist and editor. He is classified as a modernist writer, but you might wonder whether it was his form that suggested the subject matter or the other way round. Whichever, this is all great, lacerating stuff, as any honest portrayal of a purely sexually based relationship should be.

I remember reading in Gillian Rose’s excellent Love’s Work that “there is no democracy in love relationships”, and the book bears that out fully – but not in the way you might expect. The man is a tyrant, a bully, given to histrionic rhetoric (“Hadn’t I told her a hundred times that pious prostration and the erection of a saint are mutually dependent?” etc. Incidentally, I wonder if there is a pun in that “erection” in the original Portuguese, as there is, faintly, in English). She, on the other hand, stands no nonsense, and teases him with a mixture of laughing disdain and erotic taunting that only drives him to further rage.

It is, in fact, incredibly sexy. An “erotic cult novel” claims the blurb on the back, and that is, if you will excuse the phrase, bang on. The sex at the beginning is steamy, and all the better for there not being a single lazy verbal shortcut to eroticism in it. If this country was grown-up enough to have a literary “Good Sex Award” instead of its sniggering opposite, this would be a strong contender. And sex hovers around, like the atmosphere in a closed room after the act, for the rest of the book: “and when I felt her little hand trembling as it slid under my shirt, become a finch that has flown from a nearby thicket to nest in my chest hairs ...” Well, if that doesn’t start doing it for you, then that’s a shame.

There is more to the book than sex, though. I should say: “even more”. It was published in 1978, when Brazil was still under, but beginning to crawl out from, a military dictatorship; political allusions in the couple’s argument remind you of this. There is a power relationship at work between the man and woman: control and resistance. That the man ends up slapping the woman should come as no surprise. It is impossible to imagine the story without a moment of violence, and it results in his utter downfall, as is right. Give this book to your lover – and stand well back.