Phenotypes

‘I come from Southern Brazil, which is a very racist region. My family is black, upper-middle class—you know, the kind of family that is in a position to speak out against this racism. So I took the truth of my family to create fiction. My brother is black—real black—and I have this lighter skin. But I see myself as a black man. My mother might deny it now, but as I remember, she always said that we were a black family.

‘I think that this book is both one of anger and of self-reflection. The protagonist found a place in the heart of anger to build a very specific story for himself, then at some point, he got lost in this fight against racism. He believed himself to be really strong, he saw his father as a very strong man, and he thought that his father’s power was in this anger, his rage against the world—but it wasn’t. Instead, the fact is that his father could understand the complexity of racism, like [Martin Luther] King [Jr.].

‘There is a connection between the members of this family: father, grandfather, son, and granddaughter—Roberta, the niece of the protagonist. They are almost the same entity, as three different movements of the same vision. The story ends with Roberta sleeping in the back seat of the car because she’s the future. I could have written a book about Roberta, for efficiency’s sake, but this is not a book of answers; this is a book of questions. The racism in Brazil is very, very strong, and it’s still a taboo topic here. The suffering is so pervasive that some readers struggle to see themselves in this mirror.’

Read the full interview here.

‘A remarkably open and honest study of race, Paulo Scott’s Phenotypes grapples with contentious issues we may not yet have the language to discuss, which makes it all the more urgent. Daniel Hahn’s masterful translation engages with the text with humility and perceptiveness.’

Lucy Popescu, The Observer

‘This is an artfully plotted tale about race, privilege and guilt. Scott circles around the inflammatory event that occurred decades before – a racist comment that provoked a violent fight among teenagers – and demonstrates how quickly prejudice spreads, often with lifelong repercussions […] Scott’s characterisation is superb. Federico’s complexities are revealed through his interactions with others, their different views of him, his public image and inner angst.’

Michael Kleber-Diggs, The Star Tribune

‘Scott approaches complex national and personal questions with tremendous thoughtfulness and skill. Phenotypes is a short novel styled by engaging and epically long sentences, and there are no throwaway moments or scenes.’

Rachel Farmer, Asymptote

‘Phenotypes offers few answers—and expecting them from a single work of fiction would be futile. Instead, Scott opens the floodgates to a myriad of questions, probing the uncomfortable topics that his fictional (but all too real) bureaucrats would rather leave undisturbed. Posed as the novel’s eyes and ears, Federico is the lens through which we view these issues, and the means by which we understand the racially charged situation in Brazil […] It is this personal angle that brings the novel’s broad, sweeping themes into sharp focus. But the novel’s most striking feature—one that jumps out from the first page—is Scott’s sprawling and idiosyncratic writing style. He favours long sentences (in fact, the novel’s second sentence spans twenty-one lines and is incredibly broad in scope), but the writing is taut and polished, never rambling.’

Omari Weekes, The New York Times Book Review

‘[A] rather brisk novel that punctures the country’s fantasy of being a post-racial state and leaves readers scrambling for a sense of closure that it cannot possibly provide […] This longue durée of anti-Blackness plays out with a chaotic energy reflected both in the novel’s form and in the structure of its sentences. The propulsive style of Scott’s novel Nowhere People returns; in Daniel Hahn’s translation, sentences collapse into one another via comma splices, as if there were little time for full stops.’

Kirkus

‘A former lawyer and activist, Scott pours out his indictment of Brazil in long, overflowing sentences that are equal parts outrage and cutting humor […] it is not easy to shake off. A blast of righteous (and spot-on) indignation by a formidable Brazilian author.’