Customer Reviews

Brazil

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

As many of the other reviewers have already stated, this is a terrible book by a writer we have come to expect much more from. As I read through this novel, I felt myself hoping that I would hurry up and finish it, it was so awful. The story of Tristao and Isabel is unconvincing and comes across as a poor attempt to write a novel that many others have already done, much more successfully. The attempt to venture into magical realism is a complete and utter failure. The only strength of the novel lies with the depictions of poverty in Rio and at the mining camp the two lovers escape to. I dislike this novel so much that I wonder if I can write anything coherent about it. Suffice it to say that you should pass on this book and hope that Updike never attempts something like this again.

I'll start by saying something positive. This book is beautifully written. The language in the prose is very vivid and poetic. However, what this book is really lacking in is the storytelling, the drama. Nothing that I've read in this book has been moving at all to the point where it pierced me inside. The narrative was predictible and never created any kind of a progression of moods. There were random and often times irrelevent descriptions of things like love making and scenery that were overly verbose and indulgent at the expense of the narrative. When a chapter is named "The Nugget" after about ten pages establishing that Tristao and Isabela have moved to a mining area to look for gold and are enduring fruitless hardships, it kind of destroys the suspense. This is a prime example of the widely known saying "less is more."

Brazil tells the predictable story of Tristao and Isabel, the ill-fated lovers, and John Updike is an able writer with clean and polished prose. Unfortunately the book is full of quite a lot of nonsense, including some very poor dialogue, and combined with the hard-nose realistic style, the end result is rather frigid. But my chief complaint is this: When someone calls his book 'Brazil' it should be safe to assume that the author has something important and truthful to say about the country. Updike's Brazil is stale and stereotypical, and none of the characters are even remotely believable as Brazilians. He misses the most important point about Brazil althogether: Its people are warm, caring, both passionate and compassionate. None of this comes through. This book is really not worth reading.

This is John Updike's retelling of the Tristan and Iseult story, set in exotic Brazil and minus the love potion. Tristao and Isabel fall in love at first sight on the sex-drenched beach of Copacabana. They escape into the jungle as her father attempts to separate them; he is successful and they end up living separate, middle-class lives - until Tristao dies, which brings Isabel to him again. The first half of the novel is excellent: Updike is very comfortable with the adolescent nature of his two main characters, and he captures their spirit well. Once they get into the jungle, however, and become prisoners of Isabel's father's henchmen, the book loses some of the magic it so easily exhibited before. An admirer of Updike's work in general, I place this novel among his lesser works - no where near his worst, but far from his best as well.

Brazil is the interracial love story of Isabel and Tristao. Isabel is white and Tristao is black. The two have to run out of town to get away from Isabel's very powerful father. Their lovestory is very freaky, they try some of everything in their relationship. Isabel does finds someone that does a spell and make her black and Tristo white, so he can be treated better by whites. The story goes through twenty two years starting in the mid sixties. Most of the action takes place in Brazil. The book gives you a look at interracial love in another country.

As a brazilian, I can say that John Updike portraited Brazil the country far from the reality, mainly because he obviously does not have the knowledge of the culture and places he mentions in the book. His characters are stiff and frigid, and most of them, specially for coming from poverty, would never say what John writes as their dialogues.

People from the slums discussing marxism, capitalism and socialism? Those people are way too busy trying to survive. They do not have the education (or strenght, for the lack of food) to discuss those issues.

Porno movies at the hotel TV in the 60's? VCR's did not get to Brazil until the 80's, color TV's not until the mid 70's. Two brothers long missing encountering accidently, bumping into each other, in Sao Paulo, after one day Tristao had been looking for his brother??? Sao Paulo has 20 million people!

The character's names are unreal, even the ones that do not relate to Tristan and Isolde -- old names from the monarchy times, nearly 200 years ago, from Portuguese inheritance in Brazil, that people do not use to name their kids anymore, or even know about those names.

Don't waste your time and money on this book.