Before online shopping, there was a plethora of subscription book clubs.
There were The Book of the Month, The Literary Guild, The Classics Book Club, and The Quality Paperback Book Club. A pamphlet arrived each month, and if you did not want the main selection, you checked the NO box and chose one of the alternatives.
The Quality Paperback Book club was our favorite. The books really were of high quality. and there were fabulous selections: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, an omnibus edition of Anna Kavan, an omnibus of Christopher Isherwood, and an advance copy of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Aeneid.
I am especially fond of a QPB boxed set of South American literature. Of course it includes the work of famous Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, but there is also a little-known Brazilian novel, Dora, Doralina, by Rachel de Queiroz (1910-2003), who wrote novels, plays, TV scripts, and children’s books. The translator is Dorothy Scott Loos.
I thoroughly enjoyed Dora, Doralina, the story of the narrator’s escape from the hell of a miserable girlhood to a life in a traveling theater.
Life itself is theater; her rise as an actress in a repertory company provides opportunities for reinvention. The members of the company are eccentric but, with a few exceptions, charming, kind, and generous. And they become family to her.
The theatrical components of her life begin early, though, long before she performs in a theater; : she sketches these scenes in the opening pages, cutting back and forth in time as if it to lessen the pain of memory. In the first sentence, her beloved second husband, the Captain, says, “It’s natural to be in pain.”
Doralina had a sad childhood and a painful first marriage. Her cold mother disliked being called Mother and insisted that Doralina call her Senhora, as the servants did.
And since Doralina is an heiress, money complicates her marriage. The estate, Soledade, belongs wholly to her, which seems to be the reason her cruel first husband, Laurindo, marries her and not her mother. But the sly Senhora has an affair with Laurindo, and though Doralina never confronts them, she is appalled to hear them laughing about how they drug her so she will not wake up when they make love.
Their betrayal a hurts her but she recognizes them for the sociopaths they are. Fortunately, Laurindo, a sadistic man who kills his neighbor’s pet birds and then dines on them, dies of an “accident” with a gun, and that is when Doralina makes her escape to town where she meets a theater director and his wife at a rooming house.
The Dickensian owner of the repertory company, Seu Brandini, is charming and persuasive, and soon has the inexperienced Doralina acting and singing on stage. She is a terrible singer, but learns that it is all about presentation. And even though Seu Brandini is often sued for plagiarism – he does little besides change the names of the characters in the plays he “writes”– the company, often strapped for money, trusts and loves him, and he pays them whenever he comes into money.
The passage below captures Seu Brandini’s joyful personality.
The second play of the theater, Darling of My Love, was Seu Brandini’s favorite. It took place on the pampas. Seu Brandini said he wrote it; at least he signed it. The authorship notwithstanding, it seemed tailored for him; he adored that role, especially the number, “The Andorhina,”which he sang. He would then open up his thundering voice (he explained that he was a baritone) and I can only say that the audience went wild and asked for encore after encore.
This charming picaresque novel, published in 1975, reminds me faintly of Colette’s The Vagabond, another novel about a traveling repertory company, though Queiroz’s style is more straightforward, less lyrical. Like Renee in The Vagabond, Doralina falls in love with a charming man, the Captain, who is a vagabond himself. But Renee is ambivalent, while Doralina is enchanted.
The style is certainly nor what one would call fluid or graceful, but I admired this touching novel.
Thoroughly enjoyable, and if you like the theater, you will be entertained by this sad, funny, ultimately triumphant story of a woman’s rise from pain.