TOP   BEST  50  BOOKS  EXTRACTED  FROM  THE  BRAZILIAN  LITERATURE*
- Selected by qualified  and recognized writers and art critics from  Rio and Sao Paulo - 
 (Elma Lia Nascimento - Brazzil's magazine)
 
 
"..In the same way that we cannot think of ourselves being excluded from masterpieces written by Kafka, Huxley, D.H.Lawrence, James Joyce, Garcia Marques and so many other great writers;  we cannot help feeling sorry for those, who cannot  add to their experience of reading , the great privilege of being able to savour  some  masterpieces extracted from the Brazilian Literature..." 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    
   GRANDE SERTÃO VEREDAS
 
       "The Devil to Pay in the Backlands"
        by Jõao Guimarães Rosa
        Editora Nova Fronteira
 
"...One of the two towering figures of post-War Brazilian fiction (the other being Clarice Lispector), João Guimarães Rosa is best known for his great novel Grande sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) (1956), in which he singlehandedly reinvented the mythical and cultural significance of the sertão or backlands — the perennial Other of Brazil’s coastal, urban civilisation. In the wake of Euclides da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands (1902) and the Regionalist fiction of the 1930s, the sertão had become synonymous with grinding poverty, cultural and economic backwardness and social exclusion. With The Devil to Pay in the Backlands Guimarães Rosa added a metaphysical and psychological dimension to that world, whose inhabitants, the sertanejos, now grapple with eternal forces: love, violence, good and evil. The sertão has become boundless, coterminous only with the universe itself; as his protagonist Riobaldo says, ‘the sertão is everywhere... the sertão is moving the whole time, you just don’t see it..."
 
Guimarães Rosa's most important works:
 
  • Caçador de camurças, Chronos Kai Anagke, O mistério de Highmore Hall e Makiné (1929)
  • Lava (1936)
  • Sagarana  (1946) - a new 2006 commemorative edition just out from "Record Editora"
  • Com o Vaqueiro Mariano (1947)
  • Corpo de Baile (1956)
  • Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956)
  • Primeiras Estórias (1962)
  • Tutaméia ? Terceiras Estórias (1967)
  • "Buriti" (short story)
    •  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    MACUNAÍMA
    "Macunaima"
    by Mário de Andrade


    "In July 1928, Mário de Andrade, poet, critic and unofficial artistic leader of his generation, introduced Brazil’s reading public to what was to become one of the best known and loved figures in the country’s literary, theatrical, and cinematic history—Macunaima: the characterless hero..."

     A novelist, poet, literary and art critic, musicologist, and teacher, Mario de Andrade was born in September  9, 1893 and died in February 25, 1945. Hew was a leading cultural figure in the modernist movement in Brazil. His book of poetry " Hallucinated City " was  considered a manifesto of a literary trend toward popularizing art. His dynamic leadership and his enormous influence led Andrade to be called the "Pope of Modernism." Several of his short stories and Macunaima (1928), his most famous prose work, are considered masterpieces.      Some of his works translated into English:
    Fraulein (Amar, Verbo Intransitivo)
    Popular Music and Song in Brazil. 1962
    Hallucinated City (Paulicea Desvairada) 1968.
    Macunaíma. "Macunaima" - 1984
    Brazilian Sculpture: An Identity in Profile - 1997.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     TRISTE FIM DE POLICARPO QUARESMA
    "The Patriot"
             by Lima Barreto
             Editora Ática
            1998- 16th edition
            pages: 216
            20,7cmx15,5cm
            trade pbk
            ISBN  850804318X
           rights: German/English
     
     
    "Around the time of its publication in 1910, The Patriot (the Portuguese title translates as The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma) remained, like its author, pretty much marginalised from the literary mainstream. This is perhaps not surprising, as it is a devastating satire, not only on exagerrated patriotism, but also on the crushing bureaucratic conservatism of the Republican state and its official ideology, Positivism. The novel follows the downfall of a self-educated patriot, from his first, eccentric ventures into public service on behalf of his nation, to his eventual execution for treason..."
     
     
     
     
    São Bernardo
    "Sao Bernardo"
    by Graciliano Ramos
             Editora Record

    "Graciliano Ramos was one of a number of North-eastern novelists whose writings in the 1930s and 40s were instrumental in drawing attention to their native region. Paulo Honório, the narrator of São Bernardo (1934), is a ruthless, self-made man who rises from humble origins to achieve his dream of owning a large fazenda (estate) in the North-eastern state of Alagoas. His triumph is characterised by the murder of a rival, a neighbouring landowner named Mendonça, and yet Ramos portrays Paulo Honório as the product of his environment, a society pervaded by endemic corruption, where only the strong survive. Despite his tyrannical behaviour, Ramos makes it clear that Paulo Honório is a man whose power and influence is ultimately based on weak foundations, for his total distrust of all around him leads directly to his eventual downfall..."
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    O TEMPO E O VENTO
    "The time and the Wind"
    by Érico Verissimo
     
    The Great literary saga from Verissimo in which the story of two families - Os Terras and Cambarás - and their story  through over a period of  150 years of history, from the late 18th century until 1945. 
     Living in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in the southern part of Brazil, both families experience the transformations of the country.
     Throughout the narrative, historical wars, revolutions, political crises and events are depicted and the characters are part or affected by them.
     
    Erico Verissimo was born in 1905 and was one of the great Brazilian writers  of the 20th century. He is well known for his works about his native state of Rio Grande do Sul. He also wrote short stories, criticism, children's books, and travel essays. He died in 1975
     
     
     
     
     

    MEMORIAL DE MARIA MOURA
    "Maria Moura"
    by Rachel de Queiróz
           Editora José Olympio
           2004 - 15a. edition
           pages: 494
           14cmX21cm
           ISBN  8503008114
           Rights sold: Portugal


    "Rachel de Queiroz was born in 1910 in the interior of the North-Eastern state of Ceará and grew up on her family’s ranch in the depths of the sertão (the wild backlands), whose landscape and lifestyle are depicted vividly in her work. Her books have a strong sociological content, presenting the trials and tribulations of man’s struggle against nature in the unforgiving sertão, but from a distinctly female point of view, focusing on the role of women in this very male-oriented and almost feudal environment of powerful landowners, isolated ranches and overworked peasants. She presents the roles that are acceptable to women, and how limited and controlled they are, and she also shows how those who rebel against the norm are punished, ostracized, or regarded as criminal or even insane. She has received critical acclaim and great popularity within her country and in 1977 she was the first woman elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters..."
     
    "Avec juste ce qu'il faut de cruauté, de machiavélisme et d'égocentrisme, cette héroïne nous entraîne dans une aventure galopante conjugant avec habileté action et psychologie. Un livre qui fouette le sang et redonne des couleurs."    Alexie Lorca, Lire
     
     
     
     
     
     
    MENINO DE ENGENHO
    " Plantation Boy"
    by José Lins do Rego
             Editora José Olympio



     In colonial Brazil, a boy is sent to live with some relatives in a sugarcane plantation, after losing his mother. His adaptation will be difficult and painful...
    José Lins do Rego is famous for his writings on  the "sugar cane cycle", a period of great social transformations in the northeast  region of Brazil.
     
     
     
     
     
    FOGO MORTO
    "Dead Fire"
    by José Lins do Rego
             Editora José Olympio

    The government troops are sent  to control bandits in a region controlled by an abusive plantation owner who is equally brutal to  the members of his own family. Instead of restraining his bad temperament and his mixed feelings, he becomes even more cruel to his servants and people around and many innocent people are going to pay for his uncontrolled acts.
     
     
     
     
     
            MEMÓRIAS SENTIMENTAIS DE JOÃO MIRAMAR
    " The Sentimental Memoirs of John Seaborne"
     by Oswald de Andrade
     Editora Globo
             2004 - 1st edition
             pages: 186
             trade pbk
             ISBN  8525039187
     
    It is an auto biographical sketch through his character" Miramar" and it is condensed in 163 chapters  covering from his early childhood to his adult period.   Many situations showing  his every day's  life by  contemplating his love affairs, family life, friendships and adventures through the old continent. Also glimpses of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the city where he was born, lived in and loved.
    Oswald de Andrade  was born in Sao Paulo,January 11, 1890 and died in October 22, 1954. He was one of the founders of Brazilian modernism and a member of the Group of Five, along with Mário de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral and Menotti del Picchia. They participated in the Week of Modern Art (Semana de Arte Moderna). He  is best known for his manifesto of Brazilian nationalism, Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto), published in 1928.
     
     
     
     

     VIDAS SECAS
     Barren Lives"
    by Graciliano Ramos
    Editora Record
    pages: 176
    2003 - 89th edition
    trade pbk
    ISBN  8501067342

     
    "...Settled in the 1930's, it tells the story of a small migrant family in the so difficult social and ecological conditions of the drought-plagued state of Alagoas. In an elementally sparse ranching landscape of scrubland and marginal pastures, the author shows all the components of this family, from the  ignorant father down to the most sympathetic member, the family dog. We share the realities of their lives, including a brush with the law, the experience of winter, huddling around the fireplace and then the overwhelming impact of a town on the two little boys visiting one for the first time, kids who have never seen other people before..."
     
     
     

      ANGÚSTIA
     "ANGUISH"
    by Graciliano Ramos
             Editora Record
    2003 - 56th edition
    pages: 336
    trade pbk
    ISBN  8501067121
     
    One of the greatest piece of the modern novel period, Angústia is an expression of Graciliano Ramos art, in which his confrontation between his subjectivity ,refinement and sensibility extracted from some characters and the opressive, brutal and cruel objective reality of others.

     

     
     
     
       ESAÚ E JACÓ
     "ESAU AND JACOB"
    by Machado de Assis
    Editora Martin Claret
    2001 - 1st edition
    pages: 208
    trade pbk
    ISBN  8572324933
     
    Following the biblical narrative, the author tells the story of Pedro and Paul, a twin brothers that happened to fall in love for the same woman, the beautiful Flora...

    Deux jumeaux opposés par une haine farouche tombent amoureux de la même femme... Tout l’humour grave d’un spectateur ironique de la comédie humaine." -  Libération -

    "Un très grand auteur à découvrir – dans un continent que notre soif des mythes a voué trop vite au baroque et à l’exubérance. Un sommet de la maîtrise littéraire."  -Le Monde -

     
     
     
     
     
     
    O CORONEL E O LOBISOMEM
     " The Colonel and the Werewolf"
     by José Cândido de Carvalho
              Editora Rocco - 2000- 1st edition
              pages: 313 - 14cm X 21cm
             trade pbk  -  ISBN  8532511473
    Reality and fantasy are well mixed in the life of our main character, the Colonel, who does the narrative and this gives us a sense that we are not reading a piece of fiction. At a certain point we really start to believe that he exists as a real human being regardless the uniqueness and the excentricities of his personality. Side by side, around the "Campos dos Goitacazes" area we are able to savour the most amusing and fantastics stories and crazy adventures like going out for hunting a leopard  but ending up with a mermaid. Still the greatest adventure to come is the confronting with the local werewolf ...
    José Cândido de Carvalho was born in the state of Rio de Janeiro on August 5 ,1914. His most famous piece of work "O Coronel e o Lobisomem"  (The Colonel and the Werewolf) was also a TV series and later a feature film. He died  August 1, 1989
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     O QUINZE
     "1915"
    by Rachel de Queiróz
             Editora Siciliano

    One of the most acclaimed  social novels, deeply realistic in its dramatic description of the secular fight of a people against its misery and the drought, founding the fruitful and important cycle of the Brazilian Northeastern novel.
     
    Rachel de Queiroz was  was born in Fortaleza  in 17th  of November, 1910 and died in Rio on the 4th of November of 2003. She was the first woman writer to enter the Brazilian Academy of Letters. She wrote 23 individual books and several in partnership. Her vast and precious work has been translated and published into French, English, German and Japanese. Besides, she translated 45 books into Portuguese and 38 of which were novels. She wrote weekly chronicles to a vey important newspaper almost until her last days. 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     A BAGACEIRA
    " Trash - A novel "
    by José Américo de Almeida
             Editora José Olympio
     
    "First published in 1928, Trash represents a landmark in Brazilian literature, as it was the first truly regionalist Brazilian novel of the type which had already appeared in other parts of Latin America. So great was its impact that the critic Tristão de Athayde declared that its publication divided the twentieth-century Brazilian novel into two groups; those that came before, and those that followed. By breaking new literary ground, Trash opened the way for a crop of influential novels such as Rachel de Queiroz’s O Quinze (1930), José Lins de Rego’s Menino de Engenho (1932), Jorge Amado’s Cacau (1933), and Graciliano Ramos’s São Bernardo (1934), all of which reflected a new-found desire to portray the lives of the inhabitants of Brazil’s largely neglected interior, rather than those of the urban centres of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. With its stylistic innovations, such as the use of typically Brazilian Portuguese, its terse, almost documentary narrative, and its vibrant depiction of the flora and fauna of the sertão (backlands) and the brejo (lowlands), the novel represented a rejection of the often florid literary stylings which preceded it. Almeida’s tale of thwarted love, revenge, and inter-regional conflict in the northeast may strike the contemporary reader as slightly implausible and sensationalist in tone, yet his stark depiction of the apocalyptic effects of the periodic droughts which plague the region still packs a powerful punch..."
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     QUARUP
     "QUARUP" - Indian Ceremony for the Dead"
     by Antônio Callado
             Editora Nova Fronteira

     "Antônio Callado’s political novel was published in 1967, a period of intense political turmoil within Brazil which culminated in the imposition of severe political and artistic censorship by the military dictatorship the following year. The novel charts the political and personal development of Nando, an idealistic young priest who dreams of re-creating a utopian paradise in the Amazon, inspired by the Jesuit mission settlements of the 16th and 17th centuries. Nando struggles with his vows of celibacy, and his realisation of his growing affection for Francisca is complicated by her engagement to his great friend Levindo, a left-wing political activist...
    Callado’s multilayered novel is an infectious read which is not afraid to explore important themes such as the dichotomy between the personal and the political, the possibility of sexual liberation, and the difficulties inherent in the search for personal and national identity. Nando’s voyage of discovery, which takes him literally to the centre of Brazil, is representative of the dilemmas facing many Brazilians during the 1960s. The author, himself involved in the Catholic left from the 1950s, convincingly portrays the obstacles facing those attempting to press for change within Brazil, either individually or collectively. Nando’s decision to engage with the reality of life puts an end to many of his illusions, yet at the conclusion of the novel, having symbolically adopted Levindo’s name, he offers the fragile hope of a new beginning for himself and for Brazil."
     
     
     
     O ENCONTRO MARCADO
     " A Time to meet"
      by Fernando Sabino
               Editora Record
               1998- 67th edition
               pages: 304
               ISBN  850191200X
     
    This book may impress you for many reasons but it is the flow and the deep tone of his narrative that is certainly to captivate you. All Eduardo's feelings and his reflections on his life do touch us and keep us involved from the beginning to the end of his story.
    Fernando Sabino was born in Belo Horizonte in  October 12th, 1923.
    He  was the author of 50 books; among the most famous were "The Naked Man", "The Great Insane" and ˜'A Time to Meet". He was acclaimed with national and international fame in 1956 with the novel A Time to Meet, the tale of three friends in the inland city of Belo Horizonte.
     
     
     

     
     O AMANUENSE BELMIRO
     "Diary of a Civil Servant"
               by Cyro dos Anjos
               Editora Garnier
               2001 - 16th edition
               pages: 227
               trade pbk
               ISBN  8571750807
     
     
    "This once unjustly neglected novel takes the form of a diary covering the period from Christmas 1934 to March 1936, the year of its publication. It charts the ups and downs, and eventual disintegration, of a circle of middle-class friends who meet for regular beer-drinking sessions in the city of Belo Horizonte, the state capital of Minas Gerais. The members of the circle — the right-wing Catholic Silviano, the communist revolutionary Redelvim, the feminist Jandira, the young socialite and literato with fascist leanings, Glicério, and the repressed civil-servant/narrator Belmiro who sublimates his emotional frustrations in his writing — could easily be taken as a cross-section of the Modernist intelligentsia that had congregated in the country’s major cities since the previous decade. More than that, the atmosphere of superficially held convictions, deluded fantasies, scepticism and passivity surrounding the group comes remarkably close to the embittered critique of the Modernist movement that its leading figure, Mário de Andrade, was to write in the 1940s..."
    Cyro Versiani dos Anjos was a  journalist and writer. He was born in Montes Claros, state of Minas Gerais, on October 5, 1906.  He died in Rio de Janeiro on August 4, 1994.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     A MENINA MORTA
     "The Dead Girl"
     by Cornélio Pena
              Editora Artium
     
    A psychological novel, too introspective, dark,... Several had been the terms at the time to give a conception or to classify the unclassifiable masterpiece written by Cornélio Pena.
    The landscape is a great farm of coffee plantation with its huge solar, many servants and 300 slaves. The masters of the house go to a drama their suffering being restrained and covered by their stupid pride that intimidates anyone giving comfort or any inquiries of what is really going on in the background. At the same time, the imminence of a social and economic revolution with the end of slavery work. And there is a child who is the hope of a reconciliation in that land of wealth and power but she is transformed into a symbol and her shadow escalates its punishment...
     
      "Ce roman magnifique, lourd de menaces, gros d’un orage qui ne parvient pas à éclater, est bâti autour d’une absente"  ...  Raphaëlle Rérolle, Le Monde

     

     
     
     
     
     OS RATOS
     
    "The Rats"
     by Dionélio Machado
     Editora Planeta do Brasil
     

     " The Rats", his most famous novel shows the human needs in its extreme limits, also a social portrait with all its existencial and psychological traumas of people who must endure such situations. It describes the 24 hours in the life of a public servant struggling for money for the payment of a debt..." 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     CRÔNICA DA CASA ASSASSINADA
     "Chronicle of the Murdered House"
     by Lúcio Cardoso
              Editora Civilização Brasileira
     
     
    "Crônica da Casa Assassinada"  is the story of a family getting into a social-moral decline in  which all facts are revealed by its  characters through their written documents like personal letters, diaries, notes, remenbrances, confessions and statements. Through these documented material, a hidden world of incest, adultery and madness are completely exposed by using a high metaphorical language built with a certain complexity in which truth and lies go beyond the limits of paradoxism...

    "Du grand feuilleton tumultueusement philosophique façon Autant en emporte le vent faulknérien."  -  -  Libération -
     
    "Insolite, patriarcal, scintillant (...), Faulkner et Glauber Rocha ne sont pas loin de ce Dallas amazonien."  - Le Nouvel Observateur 
     
    Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso Filho was born in Curvelo, Minas Gerais on the 14th  of August, 1912 and died on the 28th of September of 1968, in Rio De Janeiro. In 1913, he  moved with the family to Belo Horizonte, where he lived his childhood period. In March of 1923 his  family moved to Rio De Janeiro. In the following year  he  returned  to Minas  in order to complete his  studies. Although he was  considered a bad student, reading was his only and main activity and he could read anyhing that would fall on his hands : From  Eça de Queirós to Conan Doyle until his first attempt as a writer that deserved compliments of Aníbal Machado but according to himself, it was just  too “pretencious  and anarchic”.
     
     
     
     
             AS MENINAS
     "The Girl in the Photograph"
     by Lygia Fagundes Telles
     


    "Ms. Telles writes to capture the essence of the people of her country. She does this with both delicacy and barely concealed passion in her choice of words. I know I was not prepared for the shocking ending in the "Girl in the Photograp but the telling of the story really did make this logical cionclusion..."

     
     
     
     
     SERAFIM PONTE GRANDE
     "Seraphim Grosse Pointe"
     by Oswald de Andrade
              Editora Globo

    Written during the 1920's, the book is a mixture of literary prose, poetry and theatre. Using a modern poetry language and satirical prose, the author makes unusual interferences on the language and in the models of the literature and at the same time provoking  the whole literature community of his time.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     OS SERTÕES
     "Rebellion in the Backlands"
      by Euclides da Cunha
     

    Many times described as 'the Great Nacional Epic"or  "the finest Brazilian literary work" , "Rebellion in the Backlands" is an extraordinary book describing one of the most traumatic events in Brazil's modern history : the civil war between 1893-1897, in the remote Northeastern interior region where concentrated the "Canudos" fighting against the forces of the Republican state.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CAPITÃES DA AREIA
     "Captains of the Sands"
     by Jorge Amado
              Editora Record
     
    "Capitães de Areia" tells the story of the very young  homeless children and teenagers, living in Salvador, State of Bahia.  It also presents the reality and the social situation in Salvador and it  refers to the "captains of the sands", the poverty stricken kids who struggle to survive around Bahia's beaches and fishing ports.
     
    Jorge Amado is one of the most famous Brazilian writers. Born in the  state of Bahia at the beginning of the century, when wealthy cacao planters dominated the land, his characters are also the portraits of his time and his surroundings that are so well and uniquely presented. Characters like Gabriela  as in "Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon" (1958) and  "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands" (1966) that certainly captivate our hearts with  their singularities.
     
     
     
     
    INCIDENTE EM ANTARES
     "Incident in Antares"
     by Érico Veríssimo
     
     
    "In the fictitious city of Antares, the workers decide to strike, fighting for better salaries and working conditions. Meanwhile, seven people die: a very  conservative, catholic and powerful lady; the corrupt  local lawyer; the Spanish anarchist shoemaker, the drunkard ; the local prostitute ; a student  and the pianist. Once their bodies remain unburied due to the general strike, they decide to claim to the local authorities the right of being buried.
     
     
     
     
     
     RECORDAÇÕES DO ESCRIVÃO ISAÍAS CAMINHA
     " Recollections of Clerk Isaias Caminha"
     by Lima Barreto
              Editora Ática


    Lima Barreto's  first novel, a strong critical approach to the  hypocritical and prejudicial society and the press that he himself was part.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

     PERTO DO CORAÇÃO SELVAGEM
     "Close to the Savage Heart"
      by Clarice Lispector
               Editora Rocco

     
    Lispector's first novel, "Perto do Coração Selvagem " - “Near to the Savage Heart” , was published when she was only 19 years old and won critical acclaim for its sensitive interpretation of adolescence. In her later works, such as A Maçã no Escuro (1961); The Apple in the Dark), A Paixão Segundo G.H. (1964; “The Passion According to G.H.”), and Água Viva (1973); “Living Water”, her characters, alienated and searching for meaning in life, gradually gain a sense of awareness of themselves and accept their place in an arbitrary, yet eternal, universe."

    "Novelist and short-story writer, one of Brazil's more important 20th-century literary figures. Her works depict a highly personal, almost existentialist view of the human dilemma and are written in a prose style characterized by a simple vocabulary and an elliptical sentence structure. In contrast to the regional or national social concerns expressed by many of her Brazilian contemporaries, her artistic vision transcends time and place; her characters, in elemental situations of crisis, are frequently female and only incidentally modern or Brazilian."

     
     
     
     
     
     TERRAS DO SEM FIM
     " Violent Land"
      by Jorge Amado
               Editora Record
     
     
    "The ‘land is the tropical forest of Bahia (in North-Eastern Brazil) cleared for cocoa production at around the turn of the century; it was a kind of Very Wild West, with riverboats, gamblers, gunmen and adventurers and adventuresses of every stripe. The whole greedy onslaught on tropical nature was masterminded by gangsterish Cocoa Barons, adept at persuading others to do the gruelling ground-clearing and planting, then stepping in to swipe the resultant crop of ‘brown gold’.
    This is the early Jorge Amado, the social novelist, so he has tales of exploitation to tell strong enough to make you choke on your chocolate bar; but this is also Jorge Amado-style social realism so there’s plenty of sex and sensuality too; this is Brazil not Soviet Russia. The Bahian cocoa zone was Amado’s birthplace and early environment so there’s a real wish to convince, a heartfeltness in the writing; the little plantation towns under the moon are made intensely, almost absurdly romantic. There’s the lyrical evocation of the rainforest running side by side with the story of how the Cocoa Barons accumulated their fortunes through violence and institutionalized corruption. This Brazil is a land where law and redress under the law belong only to the rich and powerful.

    The Violent Land is a real chronicle of a period and place, with fascinating layers of social detail about the ‘conquest of the cocoa lands’ and it’s the big, bad, bold story that established Jorge Amado as the best known of Brazil’s writers..."
     
     
     
     
     
    JUBIABÁ
     "Jubiaba"
    by Jorge Amado
            Editora Record
     
    Jubiabá is the story of black Antônio Balduíno, a boxer — with the knack of flattening any white challenger — who gets dressed after bouts in the public urinal in the town square...

    Pitched into the world as an orphan, Antônio’s life is a fine-grained picture of the life of the Brazilian ‘underclass’ in the time between the world wars. Growing up in a shanty town perched above the city, as a boy he dreams of conquering a life for himself in the excitement and riches it seems to promise. Highly talented as a song-writer, pugilist and lover his life seems ever on the point of becoming a splendid Hollywood-style success story. Amado makes it clear though that Antônio’s blackness (and his poverty) means that things always fall apart and he ends up slaving away on a tobacco plantation, with everything taken from him...
    Jorge Amado is one of the most famous Brazilian writers. Born in the  state of Bahia at the beginning of the century, when wealthy cacao planters dominated the land, his characters are also the portraits of his time and his surroundings that are so well and uniquely presented. Characters like Gabriela  as in "Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon" (1958) and  "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands" (1966) that certainly captivate our hearts with  their singularities.
     
     
     
     

     GABRIELA CRAVO E CANELA
     "Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon"
      by Jorge Amado
               Editora Record


    "...The Colonels will go crazy over her. But don’t tell anybody that they’re not married. Every colonel’s fondest dream is to sleep with a married woman. Only, if anybody tries to sleep with his wife ..."

    If a man doesn’t shoot his wife and her lover when he finds them in bed together he is run out of town in disgrace. If a man doesn’t visit the cabarets and brothels it is generally concluded that something is really wrong with him. But if a woman doesn’t remain faithful to her husband she ruins the family’s name and honour. If a kept woman has another man, she is beaten and run out of town too. If a man wants something, he’s got his henchmen. If there is a matter to discuss, both parties have their henchmen. Such is the state of affairs in Ilhéus, in southern Brazil, the cocoa capital. There is no need for complicated laws or political institutions. Things are very clearly defined in this society. It is a question of bullets not ballots..."
     
     
     
     

     MAR MORTO
     "Sea of Death"
     by Jorge Amado
              Editora Record

     
    "...It tells the love story between Guma, a fisherman, and Lívia, his wife. It's set in a poor Brazilian fishing village where everyone is devoted to Iemajá, the goddess of the seas.
    This is a story of the sea, a story about love, sadness, tears, losses, belief and, above all, a story about strong people…"
     
     
     
     

    O VAMPIRO DE CURITIBA
      "Curitiba's Vampire"
    by Dalton Trevisan
    Editora Record
    1995 - 16th edition
    trade pbk
    ISBN  8501013633
     
    "Curitiba's Vampire" is the most famous book of Trevisan. Nelsinho is the main character who is part of all stories giving the book a certain unity. Crazy about sex, he wonders through the city after his victims (while the author suggests a picture of a decaying city) in a city in which behind any door or a family'son is hiding a vampire. Eventually he must hides so in order to preserve himself but he is imprisoned in this unfinished repetition of his acts andcontinuous obsession that aggravates his solitude.
     
    "Rien n’échappe au pouvoir corrosif de l’humour. Tendresse, amitié, passions, amour filial, tout n’est que mensonge et faux-semblant. Le désir seul subsiste, mais un désir dont la satisfaction, pourtant rare, ne saurait être qu’une trahison du rêve."   Le Monde
     
     
     
     
     
     
     A PEDRA DO REINO
     "The Kingdom's Stone"
    by Ariano Suassuna
            Editora José Olympio
            2004 - 5th edition
            pages: 756
            trade pbk
            ISBN  8503007932
     
    Don Diniz Quaderna a prisoner in Taperoá makes his own defense by telling the whole history of his family,  the disagreements, the fights and all the political, philosophical and  literary struggles he had been involved so far ...
    As once a critic had put it... " two different traditions can be well distinguished in the conception of the hero's world : the mythical countryside tradition and the erudite tradition..."(J.H.Weber)  which makes in the case of the new narrative, a book that clearly differentiates from the traditional Brazilian novel.
     
    " Enfin traduit en France, cet étonnant ouvrage met en scène la sauvage épopée du Nordeste derrière une histoire fantasmagorique qui évoque curieusement Don Quichotte. Un roman lyrique et foisonnant. " Télérama
     
     
     
     MAÍRA - Um romance dos Indios e da Amazônia
    " Maira"
     by Darcy Ribeiro
    Editora Record
    1996 - 2nd edition
    pages: 430
    16cmX23cm
    trade pbk
    ISBN  8501045764
    This book invites the reader to evaluate the system and  the cultural values of the  Brazilian indians and its oppressive life  whenever interacting with the so contradictorial and hegemonic values of our society.  A great reading to those who aims the integration
    of the country associated with  the logic of a social balance and economic growth.
     
     
     
     
     ÓPERA DOS MORTOS
     "Opera of the Dead"
     by Autran Dourado
             Editora Rocco
             pages: 252
             trade pbk
             ISBN  8532510205
     
    In "Ópera of the Dead", the author shows its three main characters living in a big and old baroque styled house, where Rosalinda, the last remanescent of the extinguished Honório Cota family, lives together with her mute maid Quiquina and later Juca passarinho . The great passion the austere Rosalinda  starts to develop  for this "subordinate" is proportional to the disdain and scorn she nourishes for him . However the unexpected pregnancy of the proud Rosalina appears as a terrible blow in the life of these  three inhabitants in the big, opressed and desolated house, unchaining  crime and acts of madness.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

     AVALOVARA
     "Avalovara"
     by Osman Lins
    Editora Companhia das Letras
     
    "A remarkable work for both its form and execution, Avalovara belongs to the tradition of contemporary writing that Gregory Rabassa calls "the inventive novel." These novels include such works as Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch and Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar, and are "narratives where the author produces the raw materials and hands them over for the reader to give them shape or structure and sometimes meaning."

    The protagonist's courtship of three women constitutes the main plot of Avalovara. He pursues the sophisticated and inaccessible Roos across Europe; falls in love with Cecília, a carnal, compassionate hermaphrodite; and achieves a tender, erotic alliance with a woman known only by an ideogram. Reinforcing the inventive nature of Lins's masterpiece, the action develops within a rigorous, puzzlelike design--visually represented by a spiral and a five-word palindrome..."

     
    "Avalovara rivals Lezama Lima's Paradiso in capricious difficulty and Cortázar's Hopscotch in its gimmickry, but behind all of its intricate mystification there is a simple and powerful tale."--Nation

    "Lins has beautifully made the form the meaning of the book; he has breathed life into the most abstract of elements, the spiral and the square."--Baltimore Sun

     
     

     MUNDOS MORTOS
     "Dead Worlds"
    by Octávio de Faria


     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

     CANAÃ
     "Canaan"
    by Graça Aranha
            Editora Martin Claret
     
    "Canaan" tells the story of the first German immigrants occupying the south of Brazil. The story focus on the saga of these two German immigrants with two very different visions of the world. Milkau sees  the land, its nature and people with a profound human understanding  and Brazil as "the promised land", while Lentz having so much difficulties to adapt himself and speaks about the germanic superiority and the "law of strongest"
     
    The novel was considered very important at the time (and still is) due to its social and cultural context. Many critics even had the book as a sociological thesis focusing the problems of the european immigration in Brazil.  Graça Aranha has used the naturalism format to give objectivity to the narrative and also some realism to descriptions of characters, events and places.
     
    It can also be considered a fundamental book for the understanding of the Brazilian culture.
     
     
     
     
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    MEMÓRIAS DE LÁZARO
     "Lazaru's Memories"
    by Adonias Filho
     
    "These are the recollections of Alexandre - of his life, his death-in-life, and his ultimate death as they are played out against the mobile tapestry of the valley where he was born. The valley itself, in the backlands of the state of Bahia, Brazil, alternates at different stages in Alexandre's consciousness between reality and symbol. It swings from a harsh regional specificity to become the panorama of all human life, its endless, eroding wind the devouring hostility of all environments and its pain the pain of every human being in the face of his own brutality and that of others.
    Throughout the novel Alexandre's mind ranges from sharp awareness, through hallucination, to oblivion ('a man dies while alive,' says Jeronimo, his mentor), and back again as he experiences the violent, obtuse phenomena of life in the valley - his universe and ours. This latter-day Lazarus leaves the resisting hills and black sky once only, hounded by the valley dwellers who believe he has murdered his wife, her father, and her brother. Yet despite his awareness of the horror of the valley and his intuition of something beyond it, it is precisely his contact with the gentler existence to which he escapes that forces Alexandre to recognize his nature for what it is. Turning his back on a greater and more varied range of feeling and experience, he chooses the narrow ferocity of the valley, to which he returns to die the final death for which the earlier deaths have prepared him..." 
     
    Adonias Aguiar Filho was born in Ilhéus, Bahia, in November 27, 1915 and  died August 2, 1990. A literary critic, writer and novelist and also a  member of the Academia Brasileira de   Letras. His books were translated into English, German, Spanish, French, and Slovak.
     
     
     
     
     
    GALVEZ, O IMPERADOR DO ACRE
     "The Emperor of the Amazon"
    by Márcio de Souza
            Editora Record
            2001 -  1st edition
            Pages: 222 
            ISBN  8501060410
     
     
    The author shows the end of the XIX century and the fast and transforming influences of the industrial revolution onto the Amazonia. It shows the saga of Galvez, The Emperor of the Amazon and his great and prodigious adventures being told with a perfect literary balance.
     
    “Nobody must fear the possibility of that the flow of the great and admirable Latin American novels  are  drying. This novel of the Brazilian Márcio de Souza brings the guarantee of its apparent inexhaustible vitality...” - New Yorker
     
     “A delight…” - New York Times
     
     "Fluent, amusing, satirical, provoking.” - Ignácio de Loyola Brandão
                                            
     
     

     OS CORUMBÁS
     "The Forgotten"
    by Amando Fontes
    Editora José Olympio
    2003 - 1st edition
    14cmX21cm
    pages: 240
    ISBN  8503008009

     Considered at the time of its launching a novel about the "proletariat", it was a initial mark of a new way and format in the Brazilian literary fiction. It shows an unhappy proletarian family living through deceptions and misunderstandings. It has a vigorous and powerful narrative. A real mark in the Brazilian literature.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    A PAIXÃO SEGUNDO G H
     The Passion according to G H"
     by Clarice Lispector

     
    The Passion According to G.H. is a novel that somehow feels like a series of short stories, for each chapter starts with a sentence that gives it a theme.

    The overall theme is the same as in the compilations The Foreign Legion and Family Ties; getting to the bottom of the drawer, coming to an understanding of oneself and the essence of life, embodied, essentially and symbolically, in the notions of love, honesty, truth.

    In The Passion according to G.H. a woman is questioned about her life but the questions have no answers. It speaks of the self-discovery of a human being, in this case, the almost anonymous G.H., as she questions, she criticizes and wonders. It goes into a profound examination of  the processes in which G.H. goes through, so  to arrive at a greater understanding of what her life is about, of what life is about. The crucial moment is the premeditated killing of a cockroach .
     
     
     
     
     ZERO
     
     " Zero"
    by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão
    Editora Global
    2001 - 12th edition
    pages: 288
    14cmx21cm
    Rights sold: USA/Germany
     
     
     
    "...Against a backdrop of political corruption José lives an ordinary life, working a dead-end job catching mice in a dingy movie theater. Everything changes when he meets his wife Rosa, thanks to the help of the Happy Heart Marriage Agency. They seem to have an understanding: José isn't bothered by Rosa's dishonesty, extra weight, and fantastically promiscuous past; Rosa isn't too put off by José's clubbed foot, periodic blackouts, or lack of direction--she just wants a house. Pragmatic, José sets out to get the money necessary to make that possible. And in doing so, he manages to become a robber, sniper, and political subversive wanted by the government. Deploying fast-paced, short chapters in a number of styles, Brandão deftly presents an array of engaging characters and conflicts, vividly depicting the absurdity of a repressive political regime with exceptional daring and humor."
     
     
     

    A ESTRELA SOBE
     " The Star Rises"
    by Marques Rebelo
    Editora Nova Fronteira
     
    The book shows Brazil during the 1950's and the great radio period "era do rádio", in which Brazil had produced many famous singers that had great influence over a whole generation. The narrative is centered in the career of Leniza Mayer, a great and famous singer and all her struggle to reach her final success.
     
    Considered one of the pioneers of  the "urban novel" style, Marques Rebelo showed in his works, like no other writer of his time, the continuous transformation of Rio de Janeiro from the 1930's , Rio's night life, its sensuality, its humanity but also its degrading vices.
     
            
        
     
     
     
     
     
     

     QUASE MEMÓRIA
     "All but Memory"
    by Carlos Heitor Cony
     
    A man receives a  mysterious package with no apparent clue of who has sent it. Still  he recognizes, it  must be from  his father only he has already been dead for ten years. The son is our author Carlos Heitor Cony  and he talks about his own  father.

    Seated in his  office, Cony looks at the package, while deciding weather or not to open it and this brief narrative is the starting point of the author's transportation back to his own  childhood  and into his deep remembrances of his father: an eccentric man, who had waken  feelings of joy and sadness, shame and pride...

    This book is a mixture of Cony's biography with fiction which has resulted a portrait of the most important person  and the central character in the author's  narrative - still with some fictitious charcters fluctuating around and offering  a delicious tone that still preserves the basic characteristics of his narrative: the mood, the remembrances, the dramatical tone and also a certain degree of eroticism. 

     

     
     
     
     
     
     

     O PÚCARO BÚLGARO
     " The Bulgarian Mug"
    by Campos de Carvalho

     
    "...
    to reach the reader and  to provoke, this is  what Campos de Carvalho was able to do, when writing his  irreverent  stories covered with his bitter mockery but which he managed to keep well hidden, behind his  refined and delirious irony. With his unique style, the author calls the attention to the sharpness of his criticism and the elegant bitterness being exposed,  also being a mirror of himself , his unsatisfied world, and the passivity of his comtemporaries facing  the rules of our day to day games.
    Campos de Carvalho was a singular man, an excentric personality, a rebellious soul. Only Campos could decide and announce what he was going to do just before dying... He would take a walk around the neighborhood, have an ice-cream and then he would die... and he did exactly according to his announcements...  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

     A REPÚBLICA DOS SONHOS
     The Republic of the Dreams"
    by Nélida Pinõn

     "Nélida Piñon’s The Republic of Dreams is an epic tale of ambition, adventure, desire, and longing. In one sense autobiographical — the author, herself of Galician descent, draws on her own past — this novel traces four generations of a family who leave their native Galicia in Spain in search of a new life in Brazil, the ‘Republic of Dreams’ of the title. The story opens with the main female protagonist, the elusive matriarch Eulália, preparing for her own death, of which she has had a premonition. Her husband Madruga, the ruthless and ambitious patriarch, is bewildered by his wife’s matter-of-fact acceptance of her own impending departure from this life, but finds he is powerless to fight against it. As the family members gather around Eulália’s deathbed, the reader is taken back in time to share in four generations of memories, legends and traditions of this family, experiencing, through skillful narrative techniques, both the joys and hardships of life in Brazil, and the promise of greater things to come. As Piñon charts their struggle to reconcile their Spanish past with their Brazilian present, she brings to light burning socio-cultural issues such as the search for identity, social displacement, slavery, political upheaval and the problematics of male-female relationships..."
     
    Nélida Piñon was born in Rio in 1937.She studied journalism in Rio de Janeiro at the Catholic University and  later at the University of Columbia, Ohio. She was the first Chair in Literary Creation at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1970, and held the Dr. Henry King Stanford Chair in Humanities at the University of Miami (1990 - 2003). She has also lectured at Universities in France, Spain and Peru, as well as being a regular writer to some important Braziian newspapers. She started to write very early and  was acclaimed worldwide in 1961 when she published 'Guide Map of Archangel Gabriel', a novel. 'She also wrote "Season of Fruit' (1966), 'Founder' (1969), 'The House of Passion' (1972), 'Weapons Room' (1973), 'Thebes of my Heart' (1974), 'The Force of Destiny' (1977), 'The Republic of Dreams' (1984), 'The Presumed Heart of America' (2002) and 'Voices of the Desert' (2004) all figuring  outstandingly and being translated into many different languages.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

     SARGENTO GETÚLIO
     "Sergeant Getulio"
    by João Ubaldo Ribeiro

     "João Ubaldo Ribeiro is a Brazilian journalist and novelist. His novel Sergeant Getúlio written in 1971  narrates the efforts of a mercenary to deliver a prisoner in remote part of the northeastern Brazil . It is notable for its violence and moral ambiguity..."
     
    Here the most important of his literary works:
     
  • Setembro não tem sentido - 1968
  • Sargento Getúlio - 1971
  • Vila Real - 1979
  • Viva o povo brasileiro(self-translated as An Invincible Memory) - 1984
  • O sorriso do lagarto - 1989
  • O feitiço da Ilha do Pavão - 1997
  • A casa dos Budas ditosos - 1999
  • Diário do Farol - 2002
    •  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     A GRANDE ARTE
     " The Great Art"
    by Rubem Fonseca

    "High Art" is a ‘literary detective story’ set in Rio with political and historical touches involving rich old Brazilian families and right-wing loonies. The male protagonists take plenty of time out for sexual adventures, usually with prostitutes, while the narrative marches on via murders, intrigues and mysteries. There are some very atmospheric bits and pieces, sandwiched between the detectivery and debauchery, which capture the unique —combination of squalor and wealth, power and powerlessness that is Brazil.

    Within the frenetic and abbreviated irrealism of the detective story lies some acid social comment; seeing the decor of a designer flat — smoked glass, giant aquarium, built-in wardrobes — the cynical private eye describes it as ‘Playtime for parvenus in an underdeveloped country’.
     
    Already published in English as well as "the Lost Manuscript" (Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos" and "Bufo & Spallanzani"

     
     
     
    info@mafservicos.com.br
     
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