Living in the jungle of Brazil, a group of American researchers, working for a pharmaceutical company, is trying to complete their long research project on a dramatic rainforest discovery. The leader of the project is Dr. Annick Swenson, a tough and disciplined seventy-three-year-old woman who has not left Brazil for over a decade. Though the pharmaceutical company is paying all the expenses, no one can find out the status of the project–the last person sent to check on it, Anders Eckman, died shortly after his arrival at the camp. When word of Eckman’s death reaches the company, the president decides that someone must return to find out what is happening at the lab. Marina Singh, a single woman in her forties, has shared an office with Anders Eckman and knows Dr, Swenson, and she is the person to make a follow-up trip to the jungle. Patchett raises many questions about what drives those who give up virtually everything for pure science, questioning how much is done from idealism, how much from naivete, and how much for personal gain. The action speeds along on the strength of a fast-paced narrative full of suspense. Expected to be one of the big, popular sellers of summer, 2011.
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Raised in Brazil, Japan, and the UK, Scudamore sets this novel in Sao Paulo, a city he obviously knows well, revealing his youthful enthusiasm for life, his sharp eye for injustice, and his (perhaps naive) hope for the future in a tale which follows the life of Ludo dos Santos from his childhood till about age twenty-seven. Ludo and his mother, a cook, had been plucked from Heliopolis, the largest favela (slum) in Sao Paulo, and established permanently at the weekend farm to which Zeno “Ze” Generoso, the fabulously wealthy owner of a chain of supermarkets, his British wife Rebecca, and his daughter Melissa travel on weekends. Telling Ludo’s story through flashbacks and foreshadowings of things to come in the future, Scudamore quickly establishes the atmosphere and the dramatic contrasts between the lives of the poor and those of the rich in a city with virtually no middle class. Caught between the world of the favela, which he does not remember, and the world of the rich, to which he feels he does not really belong, Ludo is unsure of his place in the world.
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The first of Brazilian author Verissimo’s novels to be translated into English, The Club of Angels is a fascinating, carefully detailed, and darkly humorous study of ten deaths, the deaths of ten gourmands following their favorite meals. The men have been friends for more than twenty years, meeting once a month for sumptuous feasts together. They represent all levels of society and have achieved differing degrees of professional success, enjoying and respecting each other because of their shared love of food and their long friendship. Playing with the reader’s perceptions from the outset, Verissimo writes with tongue firmly in cheek, the ironies piling up as the deaths continue. His observations about life and death, about men and their friendships, and about our responsibilities, if any, to each other add depth to this unusual novel. The ending, which extends the concept of “orgiastic release” to its logical conclusion, will satisfy even the most jaded reader.
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Posted in 9c-2009 Reviews, Argentina, Brazil, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, Mystery, Thriller, Noir on Jan 18th, 2011
One of the most original and delightful novels of 2005, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is simultaneously a literary detective thriller, a parody of the detective story, and an anti-detective story. Taking its title (and one of its primary images) from Elizabethan writer John Dee, who wrote that if an orangutan were given enough time, he would eventually produce all the books in the world, the novel takes place in Buenos Aires, where an international group of Edgar Allan Poe specialists gathers for a meeting of the mysterious Israfel Society.Brazilian author Luis Fernando Verissimo creates as his narrator, a 50-year-old man named Vogelstein, who has led a cloistered life, “without adventures or surprises.” He believes that he has been called to the conference by destiny–“some hidden Borges”–and the convenient death of his cat confirms this belief. When a real murder occur, the speaker and Borges team up to solve the mystery. Hilarious, clever, and very literary. (On my Favorites list for 2005)
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Fans of the Sherlock Holmes series may be as surprised as I was by the complete change of style that this novel represents for its author. Gone are the formulaic and formal language, the stilted dialogue, and the gamesmanship between author and reader that characterize the Holmes novels, however delightful and successful those may be as mysteries. Instead, we see Doyle letting his imagination run free in a sci-fi romp that is both fun and funny, and often thoughtful. Written in 1912, during an eight-year hiatus from his Sherlock Holmes novels, and six years after his last “historical novel,” The Lost World is the first of five works involving temperamental Professor Edward Challenger, a scientist investigating evolution and related subjects. Challenger is a scientific outcast, vilified for his most recent paper, in which he claimed to have seen dinosaurs and other pre-historic creatures in a remote area of South America, but which he refuses to locate on a map.
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