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Rio de Janeiro review the dark side of BrazilsMarvellous CityWith Brazil in crisis and Rio about to host the Olympics, this is a timely book that gets behind the

cliches, from Luiz Eduardo Soares whose own political career was recently destroyed

Misha Glenny

Thursday 19 May 2016 09.29 BST

Brazil is living through a monumental political, economic and constitutional crisis. Frombeing the darling of the Brics, it is falling harder and faster than all the rest (if you excludeSouth Africa from the club). This process, triggered by a vast corruption scandal and anoverreliance on income from commodities, has rekindled old and perilous political tensionwithin one of the worlds most unequal countries.

And so Rio is bracing itself for a difficult southern hemisphere winter as it prepares to hostthe Olympic Games in August. In a desperate effort to steer the economic ship away fromthe rocks, the suspended president, Dilma Rousseff, switched engines from one propelled

by state largesse to a very different model driven by extreme austerity.

As a consequence of the shift, money from Brasilia to the regions has dried up. The budgetfor education, health, sanitation and transport are being slashed. The Olympics, an eventthat is likely to accentuate Rios long-term debt, is now also underfunded. Critical projects,such as the extension of the Metro to the Olympic Village in Barra to the west of the city,

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wont be finished on time, giving rise to fears that the gridlock that plagues the city for fivehours every day will stretch out to 16 hours.

Still, Rio desperately needs the Olympic tourists to turn up. But the negative publicitysurrounding two viruses, Zika and more recently H1N1, has prompted a large number ofpeople to cancel their trips to the Games. Drought, disease, environmental disasters,persistently high rates of homicide sometimes people waking up in Brazil can be forgiven

for thinking that they must inadvertently have insulted every single god from Brazils mansyncretic faiths.

But Rio is still Rio. It remains a hugely vibrant, fascinating, beautiful and fun city. As LuizEduardo Soares points out in the introduction toRio de Janeiro, the city that inhabits theglobal imagination is one big cliche. Yet he also appreciates that it would be wrong to denythe existence of many of the qualities that make up the cliche. You can still find sex, sea ansamba in Rio if you want to though, Soares argues, these are the least interesting aspectsof the place.

I was concerned when I read the Portuguese version of the book about a year ago that itwould not work in English unless there was some judicious editing. In the original, Soaresplunges into a story about how his political career was torn to shreds by a culture ofcorruption within the Workers Party. The tale would be readily understandable forBrazilians, although still shocking. Yet for a British audience, I thought, it assumed toomuch knowledge both of the local culture and of Soaress own remarkable career as anacademic, politician and very successful writer.

It seems that Soaress editor at Penguin, Thomas Penn, spotted the same problem and, witha deft manoeuvre, he has solved it by shifting the order of the chapters. Editing does not

always mean comprehensive rewrites or complex plot shifting. The role of the editor ismost commonly defined in a pejorative sense by his or her absence, so I am very happy tohighlight a successful intervention such as this one. It has had a remarkable impact on the

book. Now, the first few of Soaress nine stories introduce us gently not just to Rios darkunderbelly that he chronicles so well, but to the author himself. The book is mostilluminating when the citys personality fuses with that of Soares.

The nine tales are all standalone but they have a lot of connecting tissue. As a body ofpowerful descriptive essays, they gradually reveal the violence and corruption thatunderpins so much of the quotidian experience of the Cariocas, as the inhabitants of Rio ar

known. The fabled party culture exists both despite and because of the lurking nightmares

The opening chapter, Pedra da Gvea, anticipates that theme. It begins with the wonderSoares feels when he moves from his provincial birthplace as a young boy to Niteri, thecity that lies across Guanabara Bay from Rio proper. From here he gazed longingly at theMarvellous City, dreaming of exploring it and, above all, of the day when he would first bepermitted to attend a game at the Maracan Stadium.

In early 1964, life gets even better for him as his maternal grandfather purchases anapartment for the family in the attractive district of Laranjeiras, home to the two majestic

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palaces that house the governor and government of Rio State. He is woken from his excitedreverie a month later by the appearance of a tank on his street with its barrel pointing at hisapartment. This was the beginning of The Day That Lasted 21 Years, to use the title of anexcellent recent documentary about the military-civilian coup of 31 March/1 April thatyear. It is an event that some of former president Rousseffs supporters now invoke ascomparable to current events.

The mass violence of Chiles Augusto Pinochet and of the Argentine junta in the 1970seclipsed the nastiness of Brazilian military rule. But as Soaress second story, No OrdinaryWoman, demonstrates, Brazil had more than enough sadists to go around. Set largely inRios torture chamber onRua Baro de Mesquita, it details the appalling suffering inflictedon Dulce Pandolfi, today hailed as one of the countrys leading historians. That she lived totell the tale is little short of a miracle. This is a hard but important read, aswe learn thepeculiar techniques of violent interrogation, including the Brazilian militarys signaturedevice, thepau de araraor macaws perch a prisoners hands and legs are tied around apiece of wood, which is then hung from the ceiling, leading to excruciating pain.

Rio de Janeiro: Extreme Cityreminded me of Ray Bradburys science-fiction book of shortstories, The Illustrated Man. As the hero shifts position or lifts a limb, he reveals anotherunexpected hidden aspect of life, in Soaress case of the Carioca experience. Bent police, a

brilliant economist turned major drug dealer, a hospital director who is shot for not obeyinthe rules of corruption and a favela gangster torn between his future and the people heprotects are all portrayed with precision and elegance.

Soares is a renaissance figure in Rio. An anthropologist who has taught at home and abroadhe is probably best known as the author of the novel that became the film Elite Squad,which he also co-scripted. Alongside City of God, the film was the most important cultural

moment in shifting the perception of Rio away from the cliches. But in Brazil, he is also apolitician responsible over the years for devising some of the most innovative strategies onviolence and inequality. As national security adviser to Luiz Incio da Silvas firstadministration, he learned the hard way that the Workers Party was prone to the samecorrupt practices as the parties of the right. It is Brazils misfortune that the victims as hedetails included Soares himself.

Misha GlennysNemesis: One Man and the Battle for Riois published by Bodley Head. ToorderRio de Janeirofor 7.99 (RRP 9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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