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A review by bennyandthejets420
The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray by Jorge Amado
4.0
Great little novella consisting of the gossip, twice told tales, and overheard rumor of the singular Quincas Water-Bray, a man who forsakes his family and upward mobile clerk position for an itinerant, vagabond life. The paragraphs in which his epithet are described are worth quoting in full because they perfectly capture the folktale style of Bahia's lowerclass that Jorge Amado, as per the introduction, was so renowned in chronicling:
The gamblers with their games of fist-guess, three-card monte, and blackjack halted their excited play, dazed, all interest in winning lost. Wasn't Water-Bray their undisputed leader? The late afternoon fell over them like a cloak of deep mourning. In dives, in taverns, over the counters of shops and stores, wherever cachaça was drunk, sadness reigned, and the consumption was directed toward their irremediable loss. Who know how to drink better than Quincas? He never changed completely. The more firewater he swilled, the more lucid and brilliant he became. Better than anyone else he could guess the brand and the origin of the most diverse drinks, with knowledge of the nuances of color, taste, and aroma in all of them. How long had it been since he had last tasted water? Ever since that day when he came to be called Water-Bray.
Not that it was any memorable event or exciting story, but it's worth telling because it was from that distant day forward that the epithet "Water-Bray" was definitively added to the name Quincas. He had gone into the store owned by Lopez, a pleasant Spaniard, on the outer rim of the market. As a regular customer he had earned the right to serve himself without the aid of a clerk. On the counter he spotted a bottle filled to the top with clear cachaça, transparent and perfect. He filled a glass, spat to clear his mouth, and tossed it down in one gulp. Then an inhuman bray cut the morning peace of the market, shaking the very foundations of the Lacerda Elevator. It was the cry of a mortally wounded animal, a man who had been betrayed by an evil fate.
"WAUUUU-TUUH!!!!"
The elegant compression of the force of gossip moving through a group of people in the first paragraph, the instantaneous tributes to the deceased, the force of nostalgia leading the narrative to finally tell us how Quincas received his name, the outsized humor---those two paragraphs perfectly represent the novella's style and aims of paying tribute to a larger than life character while heralding the lower-class life style as more vibrant and life affirming than respectable society. Being aligned with speech and folklore more so than writing and myth, The Double Death precedes with a vibrant and exuberant pace that matches the path of gossip across a tavern table and the style of a storytelling coinciding with the passing around of a bottle of alcohol.
Plot-wise, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray chronicles both of the titular characters deaths, his first as a reclamation of his well to do family, so happy to reswaddle Quincas in clothes of respectability and ensure a proper burial, and his second, true death, with his vagabond friends. We open on Quincas first death, watch his respectable family arrange his proper funeral and express their underlying resentments with his dissolute lifestyle, before shifting to the gathering of his true friends. They revive him with some alcohol and set off on one last bender before giving him his true burial. Structurally, this recalls the Irish ballad of "Finnegan's Wake" (incorporated by James Joyce into his novel of the same name) as well as Steinbeck's portraits of Great Depression era vagabond lifestyles, like the Knights of the Round Table-esque association of friends in Tortilla Flat or Cormack McCarthy's lower class depiction of Knoxville in Suttree.
The gamblers with their games of fist-guess, three-card monte, and blackjack halted their excited play, dazed, all interest in winning lost. Wasn't Water-Bray their undisputed leader? The late afternoon fell over them like a cloak of deep mourning. In dives, in taverns, over the counters of shops and stores, wherever cachaça was drunk, sadness reigned, and the consumption was directed toward their irremediable loss. Who know how to drink better than Quincas? He never changed completely. The more firewater he swilled, the more lucid and brilliant he became. Better than anyone else he could guess the brand and the origin of the most diverse drinks, with knowledge of the nuances of color, taste, and aroma in all of them. How long had it been since he had last tasted water? Ever since that day when he came to be called Water-Bray.
Not that it was any memorable event or exciting story, but it's worth telling because it was from that distant day forward that the epithet "Water-Bray" was definitively added to the name Quincas. He had gone into the store owned by Lopez, a pleasant Spaniard, on the outer rim of the market. As a regular customer he had earned the right to serve himself without the aid of a clerk. On the counter he spotted a bottle filled to the top with clear cachaça, transparent and perfect. He filled a glass, spat to clear his mouth, and tossed it down in one gulp. Then an inhuman bray cut the morning peace of the market, shaking the very foundations of the Lacerda Elevator. It was the cry of a mortally wounded animal, a man who had been betrayed by an evil fate.
"WAUUUU-TUUH!!!!"
The elegant compression of the force of gossip moving through a group of people in the first paragraph, the instantaneous tributes to the deceased, the force of nostalgia leading the narrative to finally tell us how Quincas received his name, the outsized humor---those two paragraphs perfectly represent the novella's style and aims of paying tribute to a larger than life character while heralding the lower-class life style as more vibrant and life affirming than respectable society. Being aligned with speech and folklore more so than writing and myth, The Double Death precedes with a vibrant and exuberant pace that matches the path of gossip across a tavern table and the style of a storytelling coinciding with the passing around of a bottle of alcohol.
Plot-wise, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray chronicles both of the titular characters deaths, his first as a reclamation of his well to do family, so happy to reswaddle Quincas in clothes of respectability and ensure a proper burial, and his second, true death, with his vagabond friends. We open on Quincas first death, watch his respectable family arrange his proper funeral and express their underlying resentments with his dissolute lifestyle, before shifting to the gathering of his true friends. They revive him with some alcohol and set off on one last bender before giving him his true burial. Structurally, this recalls the Irish ballad of "Finnegan's Wake" (incorporated by James Joyce into his novel of the same name) as well as Steinbeck's portraits of Great Depression era vagabond lifestyles, like the Knights of the Round Table-esque association of friends in Tortilla Flat or Cormack McCarthy's lower class depiction of Knoxville in Suttree.