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I started reading Geovani Martins’s The Sun on my Head in English, but within minutes I was sending emails, trying to get hold of a copy in the original Portuguese Not because I found Julia Sanches’s translation faulty, but out of a burning curiosity The prose was absolutely mad — Brazilian slang words I wasn’t familiar with, alongside what looked like 1950s AAVE, hybrid Portuguese-English swearing, and phrases that felt endearingly close to the ones I heard at school in London in the 2000s (‘[n]ervous and embarrassed, I felt like a real space cadet for wanting to drop acid at two in the afternoon’) Eventually, I read the two editions side by side, quickly and in awe   The Sun on My Head is a collection of thirteen ‘contos’ (stories or tales) which tell the stories of a loose cluster of men living in the periphery, or favelas, of Rio de Janeiro The contos move between the first and third person, using the past and the present tense; every page of the book is deftly, defiantly, joyfully oral You feel you are being spoken to directly to by these various men in various states of inebriation They appear in all stages of life: as children in ‘Bathroom Blonde’ and ‘The Mystery of the Vila’, in old age in ‘The Blind Man’, but most often as young adults on the cusp of something   Everything happens and nothing happens: bodies are disposed of, women seduce and help kill cops, people work shit jobs for shit pay, and get high with their friends Martins documents lives lived in proximity to death, masculinity forced to construct itself in the tight spaces between the armed military police and armed drug dealers, and the euphoria that comes from feeling both freedom and danger at the same time The book is full of the humiliation and alienation of work (particularly brilliant in ‘TGIF’, which as the acronym suggests, takes place on a Friday when the narrator has finished work and gets paid) Although the stories tend to focus