Customer Reviews

Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In spite of being a page-turner, this is a book of criativity and of prose art. I thank a friend of mine of telling me about this writer. Now I stopped reading useless and trashy bestsellers to read him! And, moreover, it will seem ironic, but Fonseca is a bestseller himself indeed here in Brasil, matching great critics and great public! It is considered one of his best novels, along with "August", and I really agree!

The book is about a filmmaker who gets a package of a strange girl that asks to get into his apartment, because she is being chased. The guy let her enter into his apartment and place the package there and, before she scamper, she tell him not to mess with it, she will take it later, when she's safer. But it is only the starting point of the journey of the story. The guy will be involved with a carnival organizator - Negromonte -, a bisexual girl - she is his girlfriend -, a german productor who wants him to film a movie in europe, his dreams which are only with words - he doesn't see any images - and a lot more, all with realation with each other. Don't miss it!

(I can't understand hhow your publishers don't have other amazing books of brasilian writers. You are just loosing so much pleasure!)

This book is a great peace of literature. Some dialogues have focus on very interesting concepts, dealing with a lot of different points of view about cinema, literature and human behavior. It gives you the desire to learn more about the facts reported, such as the Isaak Bábel work. And also, the Rubem Fonseca's knowledge and the obvious research he made was more then vast and complete. I've read the portuguese version, but I bet the translation to English is as good as the original one.

Una novela de accion que va mas alla que cualquiera de las de su genero. Emocionante, angustiante y bien escrita. Una pieza de buena literatura.

This was quite disappointing. I searched for quite a while trying to select a novel by a Brazilian writer in preparation for my visit to Brazil. Whenever I leave the U.S., I try to gain some familiarity with the place I'm visiting through the literature of the country. I was unsuccessful with this novel. The story begins with a woman paying a visit to the main character and leaving a bag of gems. The author moves on from there with pages of detailed information about gems (I did learn that Brazil is a major gem producing county). Then there's another storyline about the main character making a movie based on an old book of some sort but this storyline is equally boring. I took the book with me thinking that it would get better if I read it in Brazil. No such luck. After 100 pages I nearly through it from my hotel balcony. Since it was a library copy I was forced to bring it back. I found nothing creative or imaginative about this novel (I doubt that the translator did that bad of a job). After talking to a number of Brazilians, the one author that surfaced time and time again was Jorge Armando (spelling cold be wrong). I'll give him a try in a few months after the fresh memories of Brazil fade a bit. While "Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts" was a disappointment, I have nothing but positive things to say about Brazil. The country is breathtaking, the people are wonderful and the food is scrumptious. I love Bahia!

The story line, delivered with a straight face, is completely unbelievable. The constant name dropping gets tiresome, especially if one gets the feeling that the author knows just the name but nothing behind it. The scenes in Berlin are primitive and often wrong. The style is that of an outline of a movie script. Hopefully, nobody will ever make that movie.