A Brazil Stranger Than Fiction : BAY OF ALL SAINTS AND EVERY CONCEIVABLE SIN, <i> By Ana Miranda Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero (Viking; $21; 352 pp.)</i>

“Much of recent Brazilian history reads like a novel,” claims critic Robert E. DiAntonio in Brazilian Fiction. But why use the qualifier “recent”? Check out C. R. Boxer’s splendid “The Golden Age of Brazil: 1695-1750” for a sense of how Brazilian history of the past few centuries can make much fiction seem unimaginative by comparison. The far reaches of surrealism and “magic realism” are no match for Brazilian history, marked as it is by wild political and social upheavals of volcanic intensity.

Which means that any historical novel about Brazil should be as outrageous, as shocking, as surreal as the history it claims to dramatize. But in spite of the promising title of Ana Miranda’s first novel--who can resist the temptation to read about “every conceivable sin”?--this tale doesn’t hold a candle to Boxer’s history of the same era. But if you’re mad about Brazil and wish to supplement what history books tell, then Miranda’s novel can prove useful.

Part of the book’s promise pertains to the first part of its title. “Bay of All Saints” refers to Bahia, an exotic port city strongly influenced by the influx of colonizing Portuguese and the African slaves they transported to the New World to work their plantations. A small but highly significant group of colonizers were Portuguese Jews, many of whom were pleased to flee their homeland in the face of widespread religious persecution from Catholic authorities.

Look to Miranda’s novel to illuminate the lives of the Catholic and Jewish colonizers. This is a strangely white Bahia. African men are faceless here. African women are little more than concubines. Four characters, loosely based on actual historical figures, dominate this novel. There’s Bahia’s power-mad governor, Antonio de Souza de Menezes, an archetypal dictator who will seem familiar to readers of Garcia Marquez.

Among his enemies are the Jesuit orator-philosopher Antonio Vieira and the ecclesiastical judge and poet Gregorio de Matos. Both hunger for a Bahia marked by freedom and justice. Both are world-weary idealists uncertain whether their vision of a fair Brazilian society will ever actually materialize. And there is Rabbi Samuel da Fonseca, a shrewd businessman as well as clergyman. He’s as anti-authoritarian as is his friend Vieira, but chooses to eventually leave Bahia rather than continuing to fight for justice.

The story opens with the assassination of the dictator’s thuggish Captain General by a young band of freedom-loving radicals (inspired, though not directly led, by Vieira). That murder is used by De Souza to justify a horrific reign of terror throughout Bahia against real and imagined enemies. While some of De Souza’s enemies fight fire with fire, De Matos fights back against official terrorism with his literary talents, composing biting poetic satires against the tyrant. And Vieira uses his considerable rhetorical skills as a Jesuit orator to put pressure on the Portuguese crown to remove De Souza from office.

There’s nothing particularly surprising about the way the plot unfolds. Some substantially involving characters are needed to hold a reader’s attention, but characterization is not Miranda’s forte. Men are killers or philosophical sermonizers. Women are whores or madonnas (and this from a young woman journalist!). De Matos is a Brazilian Byron. Vieira could be one of the Berrigan brothers. De Souza is Stalin, or General Vargas. Only one figure, curiously, hints at possessing a developed psychology: the rabbi. Too bad that Miranda didn’t write the saga of the rabbi and his people in Bahia. What a story that would have been.

So we are given weakly developed characters and a boringly conventional plot, alas. What glory is left? Simple: atmospherics. Miranda’s greatest descriptive powers are marshaled when she depicts the surfaces of the dissolute. She’s a supreme sensualist of decaying matter. What an eye she has for seedy details in palaces or ghetto hovels! Believe me, Edgar Allen Poe is little match for her sensitivity to the grotesquely repulsive.

The foul odors of Bahia float through countless paragraphs. Violence to the body is marked by no fewer than five gory descriptions of dismembered hands. This is an epic of Brazil’s colonial violence as illuminated by an eye in love with the images of a Goya or Bosch. As uninviting as all this sounds, Miranda’s style of grotesque sensuality certainly counters the American stereotype of Brazilian art resplendent in chic sexuality, a carnival-driven cliche of Brazil as all sun and fleshy sin.

The only body this saga of Brazil’s dark ages recalls is that of Christ on the cross, a metaphor Miranda would have done well to dramatize. Vieira has little to offer readers spiritually. He is the thinnest version of a priest in recent fiction. Maybe his pal the rabbi needs to remind Vieira about the value of true religion. Heaven knows he needs the reminder.

The oddness of this novel has to do with how unrelated it seems to the major Brazilian novels of the past three decades. Want to understand the pathos and humor of everyday living in Bahia? Read Jorge Amado. Want to comprehend the existential anguish Brazilians have felt upon encountering autocratic government thugs? Read Clarice Lispector. Want to imagine colonial Brazilian history as filtered through the sensibility of a Louis L’Amour or Zane Gray (if they roamed the frontier with Poe’s raven in tow)? Read Miranda.