There Were Many Horses

I hesitate to call There Were Many Horses a novel because this experimental piece of writing doesn't conform to that expected format at all. I think the closest work I have previously read was Joe Fiorito's Rust Is A Form Of Fire although There Were Many Horses spreads its vision across a whole city rather than a single corner, describing Sao Paulo via a multitude of voices. Ruffato writes about a single day by way of sixty-eight vignettes. Some are just a few lines - a horoscope or a weather report. Others, my favourites, extend to several pages of breathless stream-of-consciousness prose which I found an absolute joy to read even though their subject matter is frequently disturbing.

People die violently in Sao Paulo. Poverty, drugs, corruption, prostitution and alcoholism are rife and we learn about their victims at first hand. There Are Many Horses begins with a Cecilia Meireles quote "There were so many horses but no one remembers their names" and those words accurately sum up how I was left at the end of the book. Many of Ruffato's people are actually named, but there are so many struggling to cope with such desperate lives that they blend into a flood of humanity. I remember details now, but couldn't tell you which tale was whose and, as a reader, it doesn't matter. What is wonderfully memorable is the frantic metropolitan atmosphere created and the sense almost of having genuinely visited Sao Paulo. On the strength of There Were Many Horses though, it is not somewhere I really want to go!