''Sweat'' ( Portuguese: ''Suor'') is a Brazilian

Modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

novel A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ...

. It was written by

Jorge Amado Jorge Amado ( 10 August 1912 – 6 August 2001) was a Brazilian writer of the modernist school. He remains the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, with his work having been translated into some 49 languages and popularized in film, includi ...

in 1934. It has yet to be translated into English.

Background

''Sweat'', Jorge Amado's third novel, was written in Rio de Janeiro in 1934, when he was 22 and an active communist supporter. The next year, the book was translated into Russian and published in Moscow, along with '' Cacau'', his second work. ''Sweat'' is directly linked to the author's personal experience. In 1928, at just sixteen, he took a small room in the

Pelourinho The Historic Center ( US) or Centre ( UK) () of Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, also known as the ( Portuguese for "Pillory") or Pelo, is a historic neighborhood in western Salvador, Bahia. It was the city's center during the Portuguese colo ...

(in

Salvador, Bahia Salvador () is a Municipalities of Brazil, Brazilian municipality and capital city of the Federative units of Brazil, state of Bahia. Situated in the Zona da Mata in the Northeast Region, Brazil, Northeast Region of Brazil, Salvador is recognize ...

), where he could witness the daily lives of the men and women forced to live in cramped conditions. In a Postface to his book, '' Captains of the Sands'', Amado wrote that ''Sweat'' was the third work in the six-novel cycle he called "The Bahian Novels" in which he had tried to set down the "life, the customs, the language of my State". He described ''Sweat'' as exposing "the most failed aspect of the State, creatures who have already lost everything and expect nothing more from life". Amado writes that he had the action take place "in one of those strange tenements on the Ladeiro do Pelourinho" in Salvador and he did it with an aim, not only because he had met most of the characters in one of those tenements, where he had himself lived, but as much because it seemed to him that only in that environment could the novel take on a tone of revolt in the face of their anguish and misery. In Amado's own words, ''Sweat'' and ''Cacau'' together form the portfolio of an “apprentice novelist”. The novel features concerns that would be returned to in his later works.

The book

The novel is a portrait of the daily misery of urban life in Salvador. The title, ''Sweat,'' indicates both the novel's aim and its earthy style. 600 people live in the building on the Pelourinho, including workers, washerwomen, prostitutes, and anarchists. Their stories follow each other but the main character is the tenement itself. The rooms are divided and subdivided and even the patio is rented out. The only empty spaces are the stairs, which the residents use as a toilet and where rubbish piles up. Amado uses a documentary or modernist style to portray the exploitation of the

working poor The working poor are working people whose incomes fall below a given poverty line due to low-income jobs and low familial household income. These are people who spend at least 27 weeks in a year working or looking for employment, but remain und ...

. His use of pieces of descriptive detail gives earthy images of their squalid living conditions but there are also early signs of the romanticism to be found in his later works.

References

{{Jorge Amado 1934 Brazilian novels Modernist novels Novels by Jorge Amado Portuguese-language novels Novels set in Bahia