After Life

Tobias Hecht is a writer living in Claremont, California. His first book, At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil, won the 2002 Margaret Mead Award. Hecht is the editor of Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society and the translator of The Museum of Useless Efforts, by Cristina Peri Rossi. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University.

• Introduction 1Notes 12Part 1 17Part 2 77Part 3 121Acknowledgments 181

“After Life is not only deeply moving, but written with profound integrity. It is saturated with compassion and in this lies its intense moral power.”-Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces “A disturbingly powerful journey into the violence of everyday life and the inner world of literature. The enigmatic and courageous characters of After Life jump off the page and change the ways we think about human agency today.”-JoÃo Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment “After Life engages a startling mix of ethnography and fiction to illuminate both the world of Recife’s homeless and the peculiar ennui that often befalls the anthropologist during extended fieldwork. . . . Remarkable. . . . After Life urges us to consider, more deeply than we have before, alternative modes of representation.” - Robin E. Sheriff (Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology) “A call and response of truth and invention, mental illness and yearning, After Life is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American testimonio genre. Desire, melancholy, longing, regret, and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.” (Adolescence)