Tropicália, a ripe morsel of a short story collection by Ananda Lima, offers three tightly-wound speculative satires that are hard to swallow but exciting to read. If you were to pitch the stories in the collection — for instance, the opening “Antropófaga,” in which a grieving Brazilian immigrant woman ingests bite-size, foil-wrapped Americans straight from a vending machine — they would sound outlandish and grotesque. Lima certainly doesn’t shy away from the grotesque, but her stories are more than just outlandish. Acutely felt emotions — grief, loneliness, dread, alienation, hopes for belonging and love — guide these stories. Not unlike her protagonist who snacks on vending machine Americans, Lima devours and transforms conventional Americanisms in order to reveal the actuality of twenty-first century America in all of its sadness, ugliness, and absurdity.

Lima is interested in American patterns of consumption, consumerism, and capitalism. As Béia, the protagonist in “Antropófaga,” gets her miniature “snacks” from a vending machine, she devours American stereotypes: “an aging Southern belle,” “a bearded hipster holding a craft beer,” “a cowboy with muddy jeans, boots, and a hat,” “a frat boy drinking from a red plastic cup.” The contents of the vending machine soon morph from kitschy stereotypes to vile realities. Béia eats “a policeman who held up his gun and pulled the trigger right as he fell into her mouth,” and “a white man with gray hair and a thick, gray beard” who “wore a MAGA hat and screamed, veins visible on his neck.” Eating the MAGA man, Béia feels as if “she was already ingesting the man’s hatred.” As Béia’s consumption becomes an addiction, her hands literally itch to get her fix. The miniatures become scarier, more personal, and she begins to lose herself.

The collection’s titular story, “Tropicália,” also deals with gross assimilation, with consuming and being consumed by a culture. On one level, it’s a matter of simple biology. Val, the story’s Brazilian immigrant protagonist, is acutely aware of the ways in which she is becoming physically more American. Waiting in the bathroom line at a New York City bar, Val muses: “I thought of myself standing there, my body filled with American proteins. American water. American sugar […] I remembered reading that it took ten years for a human skeleton to be completely replaced through cell renewal. I had American bones now.”

Val’s situation is in fact more complicated than that. She is working toward stability — a promotion and a relationship — while enduring the racist reality of everyday American life. She craves mentorship at work even if it means overlooking graceless comments. She wants to feel wanted by her lover Mike, who is “white and American,” with an apartment full of “standard masculine IKEA” furniture and pirated DVDs. In the midst of all this conventionality she is striving to reinvent herself “as a particular kind of person I couldn’t have pretended to be back in Brazil. An ambition possible because Americans didn’t know what my accent in Portuguese or my name or my parents’ names meant.” But in one drunken night, she loses her passport and work visa, triggering a phantasmagoric dream in which she becomes an insect, transforming the story into a Kafka-esque parable of body and identity.

Lima is clearly a fan of the absurd and the grotesque. In addition to the allusion to Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Lima’s stories deftly and transparently evoke Albert Camus’ The Stranger and David Cronenberg’s body horror flick The Fly. Lima also makes overt reference to twentieth-century Brazilian art movements known as Antropófagia and Tropicalism, both of which experimented with amalgamation of genres, styles, and cultures. Despite the fact that her mutation into an insect in “Tropicália” was only a dream, Val perceives herself as disgusting and unwanted (“Reflected on my dead screen, I look like a vermin”). In “Antropófaga,” Béia gobbles up American tropes to stopper her grief until she literally becomes one of the stereotypes she consumes. In the collection’s third story, “Porcelain,” an unnamed protagonist regurgitates an outlandish tale about a rat trapped in a Brooklyn toilet as a meditation on his own loneliness. These grotesque concepts — rats, roaches, and snack-sized commercial cannibalism — point to vulgar truths. They leave the reader uneasy — and not because you just read about a rat in a toilet. That is a source of their authority.

“I’d thought I was the eater,” Val thinks about her assimilation in “Tropicália,” “but America had been eating me the whole time, from within.” With this line, Val sums up the insidious dynamic driving the entire collection. Balancing absurdity, satire, and heart, Lima’s stories are delightfully weird and entertaining, but something ugly, haunting, and important lurks beneath, consuming her protagonists, and, in turn, her readers: the horror of what it means to belong, or not, in America.

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