It is undeniable that Paulo Cesar de Araújo achieved a feat. He turned a 928-page book into a nimble, light read. But to arrive at such an accessible work, he had to build a complicated puzzle.
The game pieces are songs and episodes from the life of Roberto Carlos. It is not necessary to assess the author’s knowledge of the subject. Only someone with such familiarity with the singer’s life and work could create chapters that link a particular song in his repertoire to facts he lived through.
“Roberto Carlos: Outra Vez – Vol. 1 (1941-1970)” is a kind of deconstructed expansion of the first biography written by the Bahian historian and professor, “Roberto Carlos in Details”, released in 2006. At the time, he was sued by the biographed, who managed to remove the copies from bookstores.
The case had repercussions for years, reported by Araújo in “The Defendant and the King: My History with Roberto Carlos, in Details”, released in 2014. The following year, the Federal Supreme Court released the publication of unauthorized biographies in the Brazilian market. After so much discussion, this first biography is now being sold for R$ 500 at used book stores.
In the 50 chapters of the new book, each with the name of a song by Roberto as the title, the episodes of his life go back and forth in time, breaking the linear structure that normally governs books of this genre.
Even without the temporal guide, it seems that nothing is left out in this first phase of Roberto’s life. Compared to the first book, there is much more information, with numerous added passages and details of what Araújo had written. The author’s pleasant text had already been revealed before this immersion in Roberto, when he analyzed brega music during the military regime in “Eu Não Sou Cachorro Não”, from 2002.
Without chronological constraints, the author opened the book with the most talked about episode in the idol’s life, the accident in which he lost part of his right leg at age six. The report of the boy being run over by a train is full of more testimonies and is in the chapter called “O Divã”, a 1972 song. The choice already makes it clear that the songs included in this first book were not necessarily released until 1970, but the events that the author manages to deftly relate to each.
There isn’t exactly one big fact that remained obscure in Roberto’s life being revealed in the work. It is probably when reporting on Roberto’s shows as a pre-teen in interior cities that a lot of new material is concentrated.
And it’s amazing to read, alongside more well-known stories like the accident or the bullshit with Tim Maia, a lot of information about Roberto’s record recordings, which were never accompanied by technical files, which piqued the curiosity of those who care more about music than in the figure of the idol. Much of the strength of the book is in the analysis of Araújo, who focused on the ten albums and around 240 songs that Roberto recorded from 1959 to 1970.
For a younger audience, Roberto Carlos, still a teenager, wanting to be a bossa nova singer may surprise him, before including Brazilian song, rock, soul and other genres in his musical formula.
As for his personal life, romantic relationships, the backstage of TV programs and the recording of his films in the cinema, as well as cases such as Roberto shooting into the air to stop the aggressors from going forward, may already be known to a more mature audience. yes, he was armed. They are nothing new for those who watched their participation on TV and read Melodias magazine, a true bible of music, radio and TV in the 1960s.
Thus, the format surprises more than the content in this onslaught by Araújo. By elaborating the chapters without chronological progression, he creates practically autonomous texts, which distract the reader with a beginning, middle and end. As he goes back and forth in time, the reader can also choose not to follow the order of the chapters.
The curiosity remains for the second part of the work, which should be released next year. After all, it was in Roberto’s most mature phase that his reclusion took on an obsessive tone. Little is known about the singer’s daily life, who chose to exhibit himself only in Globo’s New Year’s Eve specials and in the current seasons of shows on ocean liners or hotels.
If Araújo has more information about the biography’s last years at the same intensity with which he advanced his research in Roberto’s youth, volume two will certainly be as attractive to fans and curious people as this first one.
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