Brazil: A Novel [Paperback]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 27, 1996

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Updike's Tristan-and-Isolde tale of doomed lovers from opposite ends of Brazil's social stratum was a PW bestseller.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Allusions to Tristan and Isolde dot Updike's fiction, poetry, and even nonfiction, so it is not surprising to find him reimagining their story as a novel. Surprisingly, he places them in the Brazil of the last three decades. His Tristan is a black beach boy, his Isolde the affluent daughter of a career diplomat; their mutual destiny begins when they meet on a Rio beach. Updike's Brazil, described with his customary scrupulous detail, is alien enough to provide a legendary landscape where the lovers must confront tribulations, endure separations and enslavement, survive deadly adventures, and rely on their love literally as their only sustenance. The rich prose is Updike's characteristic own, but he achieves a tone suggesting that of both the medieval troubadours and the modern Latin American fabulists. Like his earlier novel The Coup ( LJ 10/15/78), Brazil is not really so much a departure for Updike as a confirmation of his versatility. BOMC alternate; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/93.
-Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reissue edition (August 27, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449911632
• ISBN-13: 978-0449911631
• Product Dimensions: 0.7 x 5.4 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #177,789 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. 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, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Romance in Black & White September 18, 2001

By SUBIR GHOSH

Format:Paperback

Boy spots Girl on the hot December sands of the Copacabana. "An angel or a whore?" Boy wonders aloud. Boy meets Girl. Poor meets Rich. Ebony meets Ivory. Ivory Tower meets the Slums. Sparks fly. More sparks fly. The pyrotechnics create a world that defies definition, culminating in a role reversal of sorts. That, in essence, sums up this novel. That is the most I can divulge without giving away the "plot".

Updike tries his hand at magical realism here. Unfortunately, he errs on the side of magic, relying too heavily on fantastic occurrences to further his story. The richness of Updike's imagery doesn't come from his description of the mundane. On the contrary, the images he draws are intrinsically so spectacular, so fantastic, that he doesn't have to work hard to make them "look" spectacular. There's nothing wrong with that, only it gets bland after a while. And magic is not supposed to get bland.

Updike's solution to blandness is libido. Coital decsriptions, sexual roleplay, and an occasional kinky misadventure punctuate the story. Again, nothing wrong with that. Only it's such an easy solution.

Despite the weak plot and overreliance on magic, the author holds on to his elegant style. It's important to remember that Updike is essentially a poet. This book is a poet's experiment to tread the unknown, to dish out a strange concoction, and watch the guinea pig react. On a sunny day, go to the beach, put on some sunscreen, read this novel and get it over with. You might enjoy it that way. Don't forget to wash off the sunscreen, and forget the book.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't forget: Updike is Really a Poet. September 14, 2000

By Tom Adair

Format:Paperback

Updike, over his amazingly fruitful career, has made few mistakes. Yet, in choosing to specialise in that most difficult of forms, the novel, he has inevitably made one or two. One that springs to mind is the problem of too-heavy plotting. He has got round this before (by mimicking classical myth in The Centaur; by avoiding plot altogether in the Bech books); but sometimes he has got it somehow wrong (the awkward-feeling burning down of the church at the end of Couples). In Brazil, by adopting the style of the so-called 'magical realists' of South America, he finds a new and successful solution to the problem of heavy-handed plotting. In this novel the plot is explicitly and self-consciously heavy: that's okay; that's the way it's meant to be. He goes with the grain. And so we have a novel about destiny, about inevitable truths, about inescapable conclusions. It works terribly well, in my opinion, and once again I think Updike has really triumphed. To read this rhetorical, confident, sensuous story is to be reminded that Updike is essentially a poet - most comfortable when he can dip at will - language always sinuous and confident - into the general meaning behind particular situations. I am very very glad that Updike wrote this book. It makes me happy to see the novel restored to its rightful form as extended prose-poem rather than the anyone-could-write-it, superjournalistic, mistakenly overdemocratic, boringly autobiographical and witlessly posturing yawns of so much contemporary fiction.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Apocalypto December 14, 2006

By BJ Fraser VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

I've read a number of Updike's books and I can honestly say this is the worst I've read. This has to be one of the worst books I've ever read, period. It's only made worse by the author's stellar track record otherwise.

For a story that's supposed to be a retelling of "Tristan and Isolde"--a precursor to "Romeo and Juliet"--this book is as romantic as a night at a strip club and as tragic as wearing two different socks. From my count Isabel fathers 5 children whose father is most likely NOT Tristao. That tells you all you need to know about the romance. As for the tragedy, both characters had less personality than a Brazil nut, so why should I care? By page 200 I'd have killed one of them myself if it meant an end to this horrible book.

Here's a summary of the plot: Tristao is black. Isabel is white. They meet on a beach in Rio. They go back to her uncle's place so she can lose her virginity. Over the next few months they have sex a bunch more times. When her father gets upset about their relationship, they run off to Sao Paolo and have lots more sex on a sort of honeymoon. She's captured by hired goons and he spends two years making Volkswagen Beetles until he rescues her and they go off into the wilderness where he becomes a gold miner and she proceeds to have sex with anyone who will pay--and in the process fathers the first two children who are likely not Tristao's. He finds a big gold nugget that brings heat down on them so they flee into the jungle. (Here the story really begins to go off the rails.) Their two children are taken away by hostile natives and never seen again. Then Tristao and Isabel are captured by some kind of warrior-missionaries and Tristao is enslaved to make canoes while Isabel becomes the head warrior-missionary's third wife.... She gives birth to her new husband's child--who is mentally challenged--while having relations with the guy's second wife all while Tristao continues to toil away for the next three years. She finally goes to see a shaman so she can free Tristao by switching races with him. So now she is black and he is white. They head back towards civilization, having a lot of kinky sex on the way. Eventually they return to her father in Brasilia, who seems to convince himself that his daughter just got a really great tan in the jungle. Tristao becomes a middle-manager in a textile factory. Isabel becomes a docile wife, giving birth to the one child who might be Tristao's. Then she grows bored and has a fling with a tennis instructor, giving birth to twins who are definitely not Tristao's. (He maybe has a few flings of his own in the meantime.) And then after a dozen years one of them goes on a walk and dies. The end.

That's what the story is, more or less. You talk about the societal issues and allegories and whatnot, but what I described above is the actual content of the story. It's not about love; it's about SEX. These two people are faithful to each other only until someone else walks by. It's not tragic, unless you think (like I do) how much better off these two would have been never having met. The plot itself becomes ridiculous and the last 50 pages tedious.

I am actually feeling in quite a funk now as I write this. This book surpasses disappointment to a level of utter revulsion. You can say I'm a prude or a simpleton, that I don't GET it, in which case we'll have to agree to disagree. I have no use for this book and I deeply regret wasting time to read about two people for whom I have nothing but contempt. If this is any kind of portrait of the human spirit...it's better not to contemplate that thought. Read more ›

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Never takes off December 31, 2007

By Sirin

Format:Paperback

Perhaps Updike has read too many adulatory reviews of his work proclaming things like 'Updike is a master, he can do anything he wants'. He took a short trip to Brazil and wrote a novel about it. Unfortunately, this is a challenge too far for the granddaddy of American letters. His use of the Tristan and Isolde myth to create a tale of two young lovers: a lithe, poor street boy and a privileged girl is full of wistful cliches about glistening sand, Marxist politics and mahogany tight skins entwining in feral sex. Updike's Brazil fails to convince as his portraits of East Coast America do. The reality is far more complex and wilder than can be done justice by Updike's polished pen.