The Slum is a naturalist novel, the best known of Brazilian naturalism, published in 1890 by Aluísio Azevedo. It is a novel of observation of the environment, in prose, with 23 numbered chapters, without parts and without titles.
Instead of following just one person, it tells at the same time the rise of João Romão and the life of the crowd living in the tenement, and for this reason the place weighs as much as any character: the narrator describes the tenement as "a living thing". It is a novel of collective scenes, the morning of the tenement, the pagode, the clash with the police, the fire, more than of a single conflict.
What separates it from the romantic novel is the way it looks at the environment and the body, without conventions, and explains actions by the place where people live. This method is explained in the question about naturalism in The Slum.