Rubem Fonseca, "one of Brazil's leading literary figures whose flinty, obscenity-laden crime stories were seen as dark metaphors for the rot in Brazilian society," died on April 15, the New York Times reported. He was 94. Fonseca wrote "terse short stories, novels and screenplays that titillated and shocked Brazilians with their seamy content."
"I wrote 30 books, all of them filled with obscenities," he said in one of his rare speeches. "We writers can't discriminate against words. It doesn't make sense for a writer to say, 'I can't say that,' unless you're writing children's books. Every word has to be used."
A former police official who used his experiences as source material, Fonseca published his first story collection, Os Prisoneiros (The Prisoners) in 1963. It "was notable for its shift in setting, from the rural countryside that Brazilian fiction had tended to favor to an urban milieu, reflecting the country's transformation from a largely agricultural economy to a heavily industrial one," the Times wrote.
His most popular novel, A Grande Art, was the inspiration for director Walter Salles's first feature film, The Knife (1991), and Fonseca's most critically acclaimed novel, Agosto, was made into a miniseries for Globo TV. Bufo & Spallanzani (1986) was a major bestseller in Brazil and was adapted into a 2001 movie, directed by Flavio Tambellini and starring some of Brazil's top novella stars.
His honors include the Camoes prize, sponsored by the governments of Brazil and Portugal; and the Brazilian Academy of Letters' Machado de Assis prize.
Though protective of his privacy, Fonseca did speak briefly on TV in 2013, when he celebrated his 50th year as a writer by opening a small library he had built for Rio de Janeiro transit workers, the Times noted. "Long live work," he told the gathered workers. "Long live reading!"