The annoyer of the dead By mirleid in mirleid's Diary Mon Jul 04, 2005 at 07:54:21 AM EST Tags: User Diary (all tags)
	Still reading some Orson Scott Card, going through "Speaker for the dead". The plot is reasonably good, although the characters and general writing style still suffer from the "hollow" syndrome. The annoying part is where he tries to give the story that exotic twist by throwing in some random bits of passes (for him, at least) for Portuguese.

Obviously, whatever Portuguese he knows was learned with Brazilian Portuguese speakers, and, given the way they speak, those people had to be "favela" people. Not that I have anything against "favela" people, in fact, one of my favourite movies of all times is City of God. No, what is annoying is the fact that the asshat has not bothered to do some due diligence on the stuff he writes about. It is a bit like an English person reading a book by some foreign author portraying all English people as drawling rednecks from Texas. He goes on from there: Every single native character in the book (by native I mean anybody that theoretically has a Portuguese ancestry) has got a ridiculous name. No attempt has been made at trying to give them realistic (even knowing that Brazilians are quite inventive as far as naming their children is concerned) names. Since he gives them ridiculous names, everybody has a nickname that is used throughout the book. Those nicknames are sometimes even more annoying than the full names. He does not even manage to write the stuff right. A choice sentence is : "Mamae, quem fode p'ra fazer-me?", which would sort of translate into, "Mommy, who did you fuck so that I was born?". The choice of wording notwithstanding (and forgetting the fact that this is actually a 5 year old asking his mother a question), the whole sentence in Portuguese (even Brazilian Portuguese) is wrong, and misspelt to boot. He portrays the Portuguese-descended community as a group of "dark brown" people (no exceptions). I know that the majority of the population in Brazilian is of native Indian and African descent, but the fact of the matter is that there is a large segment that is of white European descent (the Dutch having had colonies there, and a large contingent of Germans having emigrated there). Moreover, people in Portugal (even more so if you travel to the north of the country) could hardly be categorised that way. Even the Brazilian connection is no excuse for all this, since the colony is called "Lusitania", a word formed from the name of one of the tribes that originally lived in the part of the Iberian peninsula that as been called Portugal for the last 800 years. Mind you, it is not the lack of accuracy and all the imperfections that annoy me: it is the arrogance and authority with which he presents all this crap as if it were scripture. I can't wait to finish this turd and move on to Olympos.

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