Callado, Antonio

(1917–1997)

   Brazilian journalist, playwright, and novelist. One of Brazil’s leading journalists, Callado was born in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, into an upper-middle-class family. He finished his law studies in 1939 during Getulio Vargas’s “Estado Novo” dictatorship and soon after began working for the BBC in London, for which he would work at intervals until 1947. Toward the end of World War II, he was employed by the Brazilian desk of the Radiodiffusion Française in Paris. On his return to Brazil, he returned to the daily Correio da Manhã, for which he had worked as a reporter during his years as a law student. In time, Callado would collaborate with the most important newspapers of Brazil, including O Globo, Correio da Manhã, where he was chief editor between 1954 and 1960, and Jornal do Brasil; for the last publication, he reported on the Vietnam War in 1968. He served short stints as a visiting professor, first in 1974 at the Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, England, and then in 1981 at Columbia University in New York. By then, he had retired from journalism to devote himself to literature, although he would write a weekly column to the end of his life. Hugo Estenssoro from Bolivia, himself a distinguished journalist and literary critic and a friend of Callado’s, described his friend in his obituary as “one of the great newspapermen of the period and a model to follow. His generosity with young colleagues and his professional integrity were legendary.”

   Callado’s literary production began in the 1950s as the author of plays that were received with great critical and public success but that are chiefly remembered as providing the basis for a later film starring soccer superstar Pelé. Literary acclaim as a novelist would come in 1967, with the publication of his novel Quarup. The title was taken from a Xingu Indian and demonstrated Callado’s interest in the examination of all the constitutive parts of Brazilian nationality. In the novel, its protagonist, a young Franciscan priest named Nando, is transformed from missionary into revolutionary as he witnesses the repression of sugarcane workers in northeast Brazil. The action is initiated with the suicide of the populist Getulio Vargas in 1954 and ends with the stirrings of armed resistance to the military coup of 1964. Although later critics have discerned troubling aspects in the dense narrative, it remains a touchstone for proponents of liberation theology in Latin America—in the character of the priest/revolutionary—and as a model of the socially conscious novel of the time. A film based on the novel by the same title was filmed by director Ruy Guerra in 1967. According to Estenssoro, Callado first drafted the manuscript while sharing a prison cell with the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, during the initial days of the dictatorship.

   One of the most consistent opponents of the military regime, Callado would also be held under house arrest following the closing of the Brazilian Congress in 1968, although at least one critic, Nancy T. Baden, considers that his fame abroad provided some protection from censorship, as it would his compatriot Jorge Amado, particularly during the 1969–1971 period often termed o sufoco (the suffocation). His satiric novel Bar Don Juan, published in 1971, was saved from military censorship, according to Baden, because it was “common knowledge” in Brazil that the English translation by Knopf was ready to be published in the United States in 1972, when the author and his editor asked for permission to print a second Brazilian edition. A first edition had sold out so quickly that only two volumes remained, according to the scholar, when the military police arrived to confiscate it. The novel has been hailed for its parodic view of the urban guerrilla movement in Latin America in the 1960s, as it depicts the misadventures of a cell of inept revolutionaries, mostly middle class, who meet at the bar of the title and whose amorous and drinking activities belie a rigorous revolutionary commitment. For Baden, Callado’s “revolutionary cycle” as a novelist ends with the publication of his novel Sempreviva in 1981 (translated into English as Sempreviva in 1988). Its exiled protagonist, Quinho, returns to Brazil in order to investigate the disappearance, torture, and assassination of several people, chiefly his fiancée, Lucinda, pregnant at the time of her torture and death.

   Widely admired for his writing and for his brave stance against the dictatorship, Callado received many awards both abroad and in Brazil, where he was elected to the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters). Antonio Callado died in Rio de Janeiro on 28 January 1997.