The Fifteen

Queiroz was nineteen when she wrote O Quinze, and its documentary weight is startling for a debut: Chico Bento, his wife Cordulina, and their children are driven off Dona Maroca's ranch near Quixadá by the drought that gives the book its title, the historic 1915 drought that emptied much of Ceará's interior, and walk the whole distance to Fortaleza on foot because there's no money for train fare. Queiroz renders the hunger and the road in plain, unsentimental detail, refusing either melodrama or the picturesque; the retirantes' suffering is presented as an ordinary, recurring feature of the region's economy rather than an exceptional tragedy, which is exactly what makes the book's flatness of tone so damning.

Running alongside that migration is Conceição's story, a young, educated woman in Fortaleza whom her cousin Vicente wants to marry and carry off to his ranch, and Queiroz treats her hesitation as a genuine crisis rather than coyness: Conceição is drawn to teaching, to a life with some independence in it, and the novel refuses to resolve her reluctance into either a simple feminist triumph or a simple capitulation. For a book published in 1930 Brazil by a teenage author, that refusal to let a woman's story end tidily in marriage or its opposite is itself a quietly radical choice, one Queiroz would keep returning to across her later fiction.

O Quinze predates Graciliano Ramos's Barren Lives by four years and is generally credited as a founding work of the Brazilian regionalist 'novel of 1930,' the wave of fiction that turned the drought-stricken Northeast's hunger and displacement into serious literary subject matter rather than picturesque local color. Queiroz went on, decades later, to become the first woman elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, in 1977, a recognition that arrived only after generations of the national literary establishment had needed time to catch up with what she'd already proven possible as a teenager.

The drought narrative's most exact image of loss isn't a death but a departure: Conceição has to talk the elderly Mãe Nácia into finally abandoning the home she's lived in for decades, and the old woman is carried off weeping, straining for a last look at a horizon the smoke from the departing train is already erasing. Queiroz measures the drought's devastation through concrete, specific losses like this one rather than through abstract statistics of suffering, which is what keeps the novel's documentary ambitions from ever curdling into a lecture.