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A full Brazilian

October 4, 2003

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Peter Robb in Kings Cross. Photo: Marco Del Grande

Peter Robb has again put himself in a foreign country and laid bare its dark underbelly. But the man behind the writer remains as strange and elusive as ever, writes Paul Sheehan.

"On Friday afternoon I moved to a cheaper hotel. A run-down place in a dilapidated 19th-century mansion by the river looked dense with character, and so it was ... The building stank of rancid fat and the hot shower device in the bathroom gave out nasty electric shocks when you turned on the water. Shortly before daybreak someone in the street below took out my window pane with a rifle, filling the bed with glass shards. It seemed time to move on."

Peter Robb is like Velcro. Apart from being one of the most original writers Australia has produced, he attracts eccentrics, intrigues and incidents.

At the age of 25, on his first day in Italy, he went to visit the legendary filmmaker Federico Fellini to ask for a job. He didn't have an appointment, had never worked in films and couldn't speak Italian. He began to have second thoughts when he saw Fellini violently shaking a dwarf. Fellini didn't give him the time of day, much less a job.

In his new book, A Death in Brazil, when Robb finally gets to swim in the ocean at a tropical beach resort, he finds the water "turbid". It turns out the resort's sewers lead to the beach, hence destroying the environment around which the new hotels were built, a Third World circularity.

Robb came out of nowhere in 1996 with Midnight in Sicily, the distilled insights of his 14 years in Italy, spent mostly in the peeling decadence of lower Naples. Written in impoverished circumstances, it became a bestseller in Australia and England, was also published in the US and elsewhere, sold more than 100,000 copies and won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. It made Robb's career.

Next came Robb's foray into pulp fiction, Pig's Blood. Published in 1999, it's a package of three noir novellas, two of which were originally published under the name "B. Selkie". The book's cover carries a warning - "Contains offensive material" - and the first sentence is: "The trouble with torture was people got carried away."

Another manic year of writing led to M, his biography of Caravaggio, published in 2000. It was as arresting and eccentric and as widely sold as his first book. It, too, won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. It also sold 100,000 copies around the world. But this time it was reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. Robb had arrived.

Now the sprawling excesses of Brazil provide the backdrop for this enigmatic and elegant boulevardier. Just released in Australia, A Death in Brazil will be published in the US and Britain next year. The book also confirms that no one in modern literature puts so much texture and insinuation into the use of italics. He has reinvented the technique.

A boulevardier he may be, but Robb lives in Potts Point in a single-room apartment that nobody is allowed to visit. Not long ago, Professor Derek (Dick) Denton, the founding director of the Howard Florey Institute in Melbourne and medical member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, which advises on the Nobel Prize, was standing on the pavement outside Robb's modest brick apartment block, phoning Robb to let him in so he could go to the toilet. No, the professor had to go to a nearby cafe. He would not see the single-room apartment where Robb secluded himself for a year in order to wrestle with the exhausting burden of making the complicated narrative of this book work.

"At a certain point, when dogs were barking at me a lot, I realised that I had crossed the point of social acceptance," he told me. "No doubt, on my long dusk walks along Rushcutters Bay, I must have had a maniacal, absorbed look because I found myself being barked at by pedigree dogs, which pick up senses from their owners. They were telling me I didn't belong in civil society."

When we met for dinner, he said it was the first time in more than a year that he had dined in a restaurant. This is a man who, in his books, lives in restaurants.

He must have overdone the seclusion because when he came to my home to do an interview, he arrived just after midday, quietly knocked over a bottle of crisp chardonnay, and was still there at 3pm when the first guests arrived for my wife's birthday afternoon tea. He moved effortlessly to champagne, blending amiably with the extended family, and was still there at 7.45, when everyone else had left. It was only when I put on the TV to see how the Swans were doing in their season finale that he decided to make an exit. "I'll just go home and wash my socks," he said.

He hates football, and has managed to write a book about Brazil without a single substantial reference to the nation's defining religion, soccer. It doesn't matter, because Robb's books, like Robb himself, defy categorisation.

The contours of A Death in Brazil follow those of Midnight In Sicily , combining personal journey with political analysis, history and food, all with the pace and texture of a murder mystery. Events all flow towards a death, though it may not be the one the reader is expecting.

The narrative tracks the rise and fall of Fernando Collor de Mello, who became president of Brazil with the money raised by his bagman, known as PC.

While Robb is a character in his books, he draws a veil over his own emotional life, both in his writing and in conversation. Finding whether or not his life has been marked by a great love is like trying to get into his apartment. The door is not open.

Instead, he allows his love of beauty and sensuality to express itself through descriptions of food, dining and drinking, which play a central role in his stories. Did I mention that he is a big man?

The onstage hero of A Death in Brazil is Vava, the proprietor and bartender of a restaurant in Recife, the Bangue, which forms the centre of Robb's emotional life in Brazil. The offstage hero is Luis Inacio da Silva, universally known as Lula ("his thick curly hair hung in long waving ringlets like tentacles and people started calling him Lula, which meant Squid"), the shoeshine boy who became a factory worker, then union organiser, then leader of the Workers Party, then candidate for president against a succession of candidates representing the corrupt ruling plutocracy, including Fernando Collor de Mello. Last year, Lula finally swept to the presidency, the first truly representative leader this vast, uneasy democracy has had.

As with his previous books, Robb's latest work is cosmopolitan and international and his being Australian is refreshingly irrelevant. It is not until page 205 that he lets slip that he spent "childhood summers at Cape Otway in Australia".

Robb was born in Melbourne in 1946, attended Melbourne Grammar and lived in Toorak, a background that has left him with a rich, patrician voice. When he was a teenager, the family moved to New Zealand, where he spent 10 years and left after graduating with a master of arts in English from the University of Wellington. He went to Melbourne University to do postgraduate work, grew tired of that and went to England, arriving with $400. Although trying several times to make a life as an academic (he even got tenure in Finland - too long to explain), he decided that university life was "death" for literature and imagination.

He went to Paris. Became a Trotskyite. Impoverished, he returned to Australia, this time to Sydney. Among other things, he taught prisoners at Long Bay jail, where he learned things that led him to write a series of articles about police corruption for a Trotskyist newspaper, Militant, which he edited.

When another former Trot, Tariq Ali, was in Australia recently for the Melbourne Writers' Festival, he and Robb attended a reunion of fellow members of the Fourth International. They ended up at dinner together in Brisbane, drinking very expensive wine. Capitalism has its uses.

So does prudence. Robb's articles about police corruption led to some "very unpleasant experiences" with members of the NSW Police, including the then little-known Roger Rogerson. A bullet went through a window of his car. It seemed time to move on.

It was 1978. He went to Italy. Taught English. Lived poor, ate well. Eighteen years later, his career as a writer was belatedly born at age 50. He has produced four books in eight years, all under the care of publisher Michael Duffy, who discovered him, nurtured him and kept him solvent.

A Death in Brazil is built on less sturdy foundations than Midnight in Sicily and it shows. But he went to Brazil three times while preparing the book, speaks the language, and has spent more than two years there over many trips.

Robb was drawn to Brazil for the same reasons that most people go to tropical countries oozing with beauty, but he also had a prosaic reason. "Part of the logic of Brazil was that Italy was becoming more and more expensive and I couldn't work in summer, so there was an economic logic to spending three months in a poor country."

Poor and corrupt. The book burns with an old Trot's anger at the injustices visited upon the poor by Brazil's ruling elite for 300 years; injustices that are palpable in the swarms of glue-sniffing street kids he saw in the big cities: "A few older children stalked apart like wingless insects, emaciated and detached from the human clusters, grey rags flapping off their limbs. Their heads were mostly shaved and they clutched glue bottles to their breastbones, under the filthy knotted T-shirts and running singlets. They looked serenely beyond all human care. The next day was blue on blue, gold on white, hot and dazzling."

This passage, the way it ends, is so typical of Robb's ability never to relax the pressure on himself or the reader, never to let a paragraph be like one that anyone else would write.

A Death in Brazil, by Peter Robb, is published by Duffy & Snellgrove, $45.

