Brazil
by John Updike
An American tries to understand desire in the tropics.
you're curious what happens when a brilliant outsider misreads a place and writes beautifully about it anyway
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Updike took the myth of Brazil — heat, bodies, carnival, hunger — and tried to make a novel out of it. He half-succeeds and half-projects. Read alongside City of God and you get something more useful than either alone: the distance between how Brazil looks from outside and what it actually is. The visitor's gaze at its most literary and most limited. Worth reading precisely for what it can't see.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Brazil • Latin America
- Voice
- An outside perspective on Brazil
- Themes
- Beautiful Wreckage
