After Life: An Ethnographic Novel (review)

Tobias Hecht's After Life: An Ethnographic Novel provides a nuanced and compelling portrait of both the life of poor, semi-homeless, transvestite prostitutes in Recife and of the process and experience of urban ethnography in Brazil. While the book effectively draws the reader into its multi-leveled narratives it is less clear the extent to which the book works as "an ethnographic novel." That said, it has extremely moving moments and tells us something new and important about the life of the ethnographer and of this particular subject.

Hecht's book recounts the experience of Zöe, a 36 year old academic with a tenure-track job far from Brazil, who has recently suffered the loss of her mother and an illness that now prevents her from having children. In the opening chapter she arrives, on her first sabbatical, in Recife, a city she had lived in ten years earlier while conducting dissertation research about street children. The opening chapters focus on her rapid slide into suicidal depression and her bleak views of the city during this period. After seeking out the help of Fátima, a well-off friend who never leaves her home after dark, Zöe runs into Aparecida, a transvestite prostitute whom she had met years earlier as a homeless child. Zöe gives Aparecida a tape recorder to recount her experiences and begins to conduct an ethnography of her life that culminates with Zöe coming to terms with the loss of her mother, her own infertility, and the difficulties of her work as an ethnographer.

This story has many parallels to Hecht's own story. Over ten years he recorded the statements and conversations of Bruna Veríssimo, a transvestite prostitute whom he had met while conducting field research in the early 1990s. For years Veríssimo passed recordings to Hecht that Hecht eventually realized were not accurate and decided that instead of publishing an ethnography of Veríssimo he would write a novel that recounted her experiences.

The more ethnographic portions of After Life provide us with startling insights into the life of the poor in Recife. The vibrant, and apparently not completely accurate, testimonies of Veríssimo that make up the second section of the book are fascinating and provide a vivid picture of a piece of the world that few have access to. The complete "truth"fulness of these stories, in a sense, is not even fully relevant because, as Hecht notes in the introduction, they could not have really emerged from any other context. Indeed, Veríssimo's imagination of her own life and the life of her city reflects a certain situated knowledge that the enthnographer could illuminate through analysis.

The more "novel" portions of After Life, however, do not work as well. Zöe gives us some interesting insights into the experience of ethnographers and the doubts and concerns many have about their work. That said, there is so much going on with Zöe that it is hard to gain any particular insights into her character in the approximately 130 pages devoted to her story. The character of Zöe complicates understanding the lives of Aparecida / Veríssimo. With so much time devoted to telling Zöe's story we get very little interrogation of the "truth" of Veríssimo's tales and I am not convinced that more traditional ethnographic analysis would not have been a more powerful technique for understanding the world of transvestite sex workers in Recife in both its facts and in Veríssimo's imagination. Zöe also complicated the story by transposing the gender of the ethnographer. Veríssimo is a biological man living as a woman who recounts a story to a male ethnographer. It is not clear that Veríssimo would have developed the same relationship with a young female ethnographer that she developed with Hecht. This point is brought home in the third section of the book when Apar-ecida and other transvestite prostitutes claim that...