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Brazil
Cover of Brazil
Brazil
A Novel
Borrow Borrow
In the dream-Brazil of John Updike’s imagining, almost anything is possible if you are young and in love. When Tristão Raposo, a black nineteen-year-old from the Rio slums, and Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, meet on Copacabana Beach, their flight from family and into marriage takes them to the farthest reaches of Brazil’s phantasmagoric western frontier. Privation, violence, captivity, and reversals of fortune afflict them, yet this latter-day Tristan and Iseult cling to the faith that each is the other’s fate for life. Spanning twenty-two years, from the sixties through the eighties, Brazil surprises with its celebration of passion, loyalty, romance, and New World innocence.
In the dream-Brazil of John Updike’s imagining, almost anything is possible if you are young and in love. When Tristão Raposo, a black nineteen-year-old from the Rio slums, and Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, meet on Copacabana Beach, their flight from family and into marriage takes them to the farthest reaches of Brazil’s phantasmagoric western frontier. Privation, violence, captivity, and reversals of fortune afflict them, yet this latter-day Tristan and Iseult cling to the faith that each is the other’s fate for life. Spanning twenty-two years, from the sixties through the eighties, Brazil surprises with its celebration of passion, loyalty, romance, and New World innocence.
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Excerpts-
  • From the book i. The Beach
     
    BLACK is a shade of brown. So is white, if you look. On Copacabana, the most democratic, crowded, and dangerous of Rio de Janeiro’s beaches, all colors merge into one joyous, sun-stunned flesh-color, coating the sand with a second, living skin.
     
    One day not long after Christmas Day years ago, when the military was in power in far-off Brasília, the beach felt blinding, what with the noon glare, the teeming bodies, and the salt that Tristão brought back in his eyes from the breakers beyond the sandbar. So strongly did the December sun strike down that small circular rainbows had kept appearing in the spray of the breakers, out there beyond the bar, all about the boy’s sparkling head, like spirits. Nevertheless, returning to the threadbare T-shirt that served him also for a towel, he spotted the pale girl in a pale two-piece bathing suit, standing erect back where the crowd thinned. Beyond her were the open spaces for volleyball and the sidewalk of the Avenida Atlântica, with its undulating tessellated stripes.
     
    She was with another girl, shorter and darker, who was anointing her back with lotion; the cool touches made the first, pale girl arch her spine inward, thrusting her breasts in one direction and in the other the sleek semi-circles of her already greased hips. It was not so much the pallor of her skin that had drawn Tristão’s stinging eyes. Very white foreign women, Canadians and Danes, came to this celebrated beach, and German and Polish Brazilians from São Paulo and the South. It was not her whiteness but the challenging effect of her little suit’s blending with her skin in an impression of total public nudity.
     
    Not total: she wore a black straw hat, with a flat crown, rolled-up brim, and glossy dark ribbon. The sort of hat, Tristão thought, an upper-class girl from Leblon would wear to the funeral of her father.
     
    “An angel or a whore?” he inquired of his half-brother Euclides.
     
    Euclides was shortsighted and where he could not see he hid his confusion behind philosophical questions. “Why cannot a girl be both?” he asked.
     
    “This dolly, I think she was made for me,” said Tristão, impulsively, out of those inner depths where his fate was being fashioned in sudden clumsy strokes that carried away, all at once, whole pieces of his life. He believed in spirits, and in fate. He was nineteen, and not an abandonado, for he had a mother, but his mother was a whore, and even worse than a whore, for she drunkenly slept with men without money, and bred tadpole children like a human swamp of forgetfulness and casual desire. He and Euclides had been born a year apart; neither knew any more about their fathers than the disparate genetic evidence on their faces. They had spent enough time in school to learn to read street signs and advertisements and no more; they worked as a team, stealing and robbing when their hunger became great, and were as afraid of the gangs that wished to absorb them as of the military police. These gangs were children, as merciless and innocent as packs of wolves. Rio in those years had less traffic and violence and poverty and crime than now, but to those alive then it seemed noisy and violent and poor and criminal enough. For some time Tristão had been feeling he had outgrown crime and must seek a way into the upper world from which advertisements and television and airplanes come. This distant pale girl, the spirits now assured him, was the appointed way.
     
    His wet and sandy T-shirt in his hand, he picked his way through...
About the Author-
  • John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    January 24, 1994
    Nothing Updike has written before prepares the reader for this book, a tale of doomed lovers with wry reference to the Tristan and Isolde legend. Black street kid Tristao Raposo, 19, first sees blonde, convent-educated Isabel Leme, 18, on a beach in Rio; both recognize that they are fated to be lovers. He is sophisticated in the ruthless rapacity of the poor; she is ``accustomed to the logic and wealth of power,'' but both are starry-eyed idealists and romantics who decide to defy Isabel's diplomat father and run away together. Forcibly parted for two years by her father's henchmen, the pair eventually reunite and begin a series of ill-fated adventures that lead them into the Brazilian jungle and into the heart of darkness. Recounting the lovers' tragic trajectory from heedless passion to degrading toil to false security to ironic, brutal death, Updike draws a panoramic picture of Brazil over the past three decades, depicting a country in social and economic chaos with a huge, despairing underclass and a largely heedless wealthy population. In settings as varied as the country's topography--Rio, Sao Paulo, Brasilia, the gold mining area of the Dourados, and the jungles of the Mato Grosso--Updike delineates the tyranny of the white men over people of color, the despoilation of the land, the demise of the spiritual dimension in the modern world. He has assimiliated an astonishing amount of knowledge about flora and fauna, native tribal customs and lore, including sorcery. Indeed, it comes as no surprise when the narrative segues into magical realism. Despite its emphasis on the enobling qualities of true love, this is a dark book that speaks of ``a steady decay from birth to death.'' Even Updike's language is different here: the intellectual legerdemain, the shimmering metaphors and caustic humor are largely abandoned for a straightforward narrative prose. Whether or not this will be the ``breakthrough'' book to a larger audience that his publisher foresees, this is an intriguing story that takes Updike into new territory in many senses of the word. 75,000 first printing; BOMC selection.

  • Publisher's Weekly

    February 27, 1995
    Updike's Tristan-and-Isolde tale of doomed lovers from opposite ends of Brazil's social stratum was a PW bestseller.

  • The New Criterion "Steamy . . . breathtaking . . . In Updike's novel, our vast South American neighbor emerges as a country both ancient and new."
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    Random House Publishing Group
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John Updike
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