Via Ápia

From one of Brazil’s most acclaimed new literary stars, a twenty-first-century epic set in Rio’s largest favela.

 

Brothers Washington and Wesley work part-time as servers for kids’ birthday parties. Their neighbors, Douglas, Murilo, and Biel, split an apartment not far from the beach on Via Ápia, the main avenue of the favela Rocinha, in Rio de Janeiro.

The lives of these five friends are far from the ease and leisure that many associate with one of Brazil’s most photogenic, well-known cities. Still, they manage, and life on the morro, the hill, is good. All of this is upturned when, in November 2011, the UPP, Brazil’s militarized police, occupies Rocinha as part of the "pacification" efforts in anticipation of the World Cup. Via Ápia is divided into three parts: the expectant anxiousness before the UPP invasion; the chaos born from their installation on the hill; and their silent withdrawal from the favela after one year.

Geovani Martins’s prodigious debut novel knits together the dramas and dreams of the favela during a peak of unrest. Like the boomboom-kat of Brazilian funk, the unbridled ambitions and the resolute friendships of these characters blare through Via Ápia, delivering a resonant counternarrative to the notion that violent interventions are the state's only remedies to social problems. The favela retorts: Life, life is the answer.