A Portrait of Sao Paulo

Book Review: There Were Many Horses by Luiz Ruffato, translated by Anthony Doyle

Sao Paulo, Brazil is the largest city in the western hemisphere, and the twelfth largest in the world; home to over 11 million people. In "There Were Many Horses", Luiz Ruffato manages to condense this sprawling metropolis into less than 200 pages.

In order to accomplish this feat, Ruffato resorts to the age-old artistic technique of mosaic, creating a picture by assembling many small fragments. The fragments he uses are the bits and pieces of the lives of the citizens of Sao Paulo - their daily struggles, their small victories and defeats.

Like the citizens of the city themselves, each of these pieces has its own individual style. Some are first-person, some are third-person; there are bits of poetry, streams of consciousness, to-do lists, and formal prose. Each has its own perspective, its own voice. No two are the same, yet there is a common thread that joins them: the search for some small portion of happiness, the core of being human.

"... swaying this way and that way in the back of the truck her radiant blue eyes scanning the green expanse of the rolling hills and she was so happy the kind of happiness we feel at seven years of age and which now ... as she's spread out drunk on the floor, she desperately recognizes my god how did I let it crumble and slip between my fingers ..."

If you look at a mosaic from up close, you will see nothing but broken pieces, seemingly stuck together at random. But as you move back, the picture becomes clearer, until suddenly it pops into view. There Were Many Horses is much greater than the sum of its seemingly disparate parts. We must step back and take a wider view, and Ruffato's picture becomes strikingly clear. He reminds us that a city is more than just streets and buildings and cars; the essence of any city lies in the people that live and dream and die there.