Success story: Milton Hatoum

ENAR

This article is part of an in depth special report on the Lebanese in Brazil. Read more stories as they’re published here, or pick up July’s issue at newsstands in Lebanon. Milton Hatoum works hard to find the tranquility that enables him to produce his best writing — penning every page by hand in his peaceful office in the heart of São Paulo. Perhaps his most famous work — The Brothers — was described by the English writer AS Byatt as “simultaneously rich and spare, a tale of a complicated family in which tensions between Christianity and Islam … men and women, are elegantly and mysteriously worked out.” It tells the story of two brothers of Lebanese descent in the Amazonian town of Manaus, where Hatoum grew up. The parents, like Hatoum’s own, are a mixed couple — the father a Muslim, the mother a Maronite Christian. “In Lebanon it