Amazon.com Review
Brazilian filmmaker and author Rubem Fonesca has written that highest of treats: a literary thriller that tickles both the cerebellum and the adrenaline gland. The unnamed hero of this novel is, like Fonesca, a filmmaker, but one who has temporarily abandoned the world of cinema in order to make television commercials for his televangelist brother. On the eve of an important meeting with a German film company, the narrator receives an unexpected visitor, a strange woman named Angélica, who apparently rang his doorbell at random in order to escape from unseen assailants. He allows her to spend the night, but when he awakes the following morning, his houseguest is gone. There is only a mysterious package and a note: "'My friend,' Angélica's tiny writing was hard to read. 'Thank you very much for saving my life.... Please take care of this package for me, hide it well, and one day I'll come back for it. Your friend Angélica.'"
It seems Angélica spoke her gratitude too soon; it isn't long before her murdered corpse is discovered, and the narrator finds himself up to his neck in nefarious plots, smuggled jewels, rare manuscripts, and underhanded schemes both political and literary in which the works of the great Russian writer Isaac Babel figure prominently. Fonesca weaves not only these intriguing strands, but also an elusive personal tragedy, more sex than you can shake a stick at, and fascinating meditations on the life and work of Babel into this complex tapestry without ever dropping a stitch. Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts is a vastly entertaining and near-perfect read.
From Publishers Weekly
The unnamed narrator of this playful, witty Brazilian bestseller is a movie director on a mission: to find a manuscript of the great Isaac Babel's only novel. The director is grieving over his dead wife in late-1980s Rio when an obese carnival dancer asks him to hold a package for her. Shortly thereafter, and after hearing news of the dancer's murder, the director discovers that this package contains precious gems; at the same time, he receives an offer from a German producer to make a movie out of Babel's story collection Red Cavalry. Not until the director arrives in Germany and befriends his beautiful assigned co-translator does he discover the connections between these lost gems and another kind of lost gem: the masterpiece reputed to have vanished when Babel was shot in one of Stalin's gulags. Fonseca's books (High Art, etc.) are like the movies of Spain's Pedro Almodovar: they take an infectious, comic delight in the solemnity of popular fiction (whether thriller or melodrama, on page or on screen) without exhibiting solemnity themselves. This novel is, also, largely about movies, in particular the comparison between movies and books as modes of representation. The erudite, seductive director survives his misadventures in part by remembering what various movie characters would do in the same fix?but, to his dismay, he dreams in words without images: the book's title refers to an early psychologist's description of dreams like his. In other hands, such conceits might be merely clever or absurd, but Fonseca invests them with matter-of-fact eros and gives his globe-trotting intriguants a fresh, dreamlike reality of their own.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
