Arrigo

Abstract

Locked in the room with a dead man. This is how the narrator of Arrigo, Marcelo Ridenti's debut novel, begins (telling us) and ends (writing) the story of the activist who encompasses a century of revolutionary struggles in Brazil. From the general strike of 1917—in which he participated as a child—through the Tenente revolts, the resistance to the Vargas dictatorship, the armed struggle against the Civil-Military Dictatorship of 1964, and on to Lula's victory in 2002, Arrigo's trajectory—which also includes the fight against Francoism in the Spanish Civil War, the resistance to Nazism in France, socialist training in Cuba, the enthusiasm for Mao's Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the celebration of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal—embodies decisive moments of what Eric Hobsbawm defined as the "Age of Revolutions."