In Praise of Lies [Paperback]

Patricia Melo (Author), Clifford E. Landers (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 18, 1999

Written in the tradition of the classic American noir of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, In Praise of Lies is a brilliantly clever, fiendishly funny crime novel about a woman who raises poisonous snakes and the man who loves her enough to attempt murder....

Jose Guber is in love with a deadly woman. While writing his next crime novel, he is in search of a unique murder weapon, which is how he meets Melissa, a serologist who specializes in venomous snakes. Melissa becomes rather too interested in Jose's dastardly plots--unashamedly plagiarized from the classics: Chesterton, Poe, Dostoevsky, his editor none the wiser--and she especially likes the ones where diabolical women seduce and corrupt weak men. Melissa makes it clear that she would like to adapt one of the plots to dispose of her present husband, enabling Jose and Melissa to be together. But the course of true love and homicide does not always run smoothly, certainly not when the accomplice rattlesnake gets depressed and everything that can go wrong does go hilariously haywire. With sharp wit and impressive agility, Patricia Melo leads the reader into a teasing world of deviousness. Literary puzzles and comic swipes at book publishing trends are added pleasures in what is, above all, a glorious page-turner.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Melo (The Killer) is a promising literary crime novelist, one of a new crop of Brazilian suspense writers that includes Rubem Fonseca. In her second book, she focuses on the career of Jos? Guber, a bottom-rung hack who rips off classic detective story plots and turns them into pulp fiction for a second-rate publishing house run by a philistine named Wilmer da Silva. Researching a plot involving death by snakebite, Jos? meets Melissa at a serology laboratory. Melissa, fervent about all things reptilian, soon becomes Jos?'s lover, sealing her passion by giving him an illegal boa constrictor. Jos? knows Melissa is married, but what he doesn't know is that she is becoming rich defying Brazilian law and dealing venom on the black market. Convincing Jos? that her husband Ronald beats her (which is not true), Melissa persuades him to participate in her scheme to kill Ronald, with the help of a deadly jararaca. To her dismay, Ronald merely loses a leg, while distracted Jose loses his job. But his former boss's secretary, Ingrid, has always liked Jos?, and she helps him find work as a corny self-help writer. When Jos? realizes that supportive Ingrid is more his kind of lady than the cunning Melissa, the spurned woman shows her fangs. Melo saturates her prose with literary references, effectively intellectualizing what is at heart a zesty suspense novel with a kinky, unpredictable murderess. Jos? as a "babe-magnet" is unconvincing, but he's hilarious when submitting his book "outlines" to Wilmer. Melo keeps the tale oscillating between morbid intrigue and hilarity, deftly skewering the publishing industry in the process. (Sept.) FYI: The Killer won the French Prix Deux Ocean and the German Deutscher Krimi Preis.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Brazilian screenwriter and novelist Melo (The Killer, 1997) shows great ingenuity with suggestion and implicationbut in a somewhat ordinary, noir-ish novel about people who cant be with the ones they love, so they kill the ones theyre with. Jos Guber, a Sao Paulo writer of cheesy mysteries and pulp paperbacks, is looking for something to enliven his plot proposals to his greedy, hard-to-please editor. He happens upon a serpentarium, where he meets Melissa, a beautiful scientist deeply fascinated by most things lethalsnake venom in particular. Jos, still struggling with his proposals, falls in love with Melissa, and together they conspire to kill her husband, who she claims regularly beats her. Joss mental states during the planning and execution of the murder are nicely reflected in the book proposals he continues to revise and submit, and husband Ronald is finally dispatched at the business end of Melissas pistol. We rejoin Jos after hes married and separated from Melissa (offstage), and reinvented himself as a writer of self-help books, handbooks on meditation, and, finally, Conversations With the Creator, a bestseller that suggests Joss newfound hubris. This sly joke is one of the novels genuine pleasures, as Melo includes interview transcripts with the newly idolized guru, commenting on his special relationship to God while hes fully aware of his scam. Having become lovers with Ingrid, his former publishers secretary, Jos then learns that Melissa came into a financial windfall after Ronalds death. Ingrids suspicions are suddenly raisedwith fatal consequences. The intrigue may please readers hungry for plot innovations, but the less-than-satisfying conclusion is sure to disappoint. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (September 18, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582340587
• ISBN-13: 978-1582340586
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,313,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beware the Snake Charmer, March 13, 2000

By 

lvkleydorff - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Praise of Lies (Paperback)

What a wonderful little book! Extremely innovative, tightly written, just what a mystery should be. We know where the story leads, but the way to that goal is utterly fascinating.The author never insults our intelligence. Quite a reprieve from all those shlock writings. And cudos to the translator!

3.0 out of 5 stars Funny but rather rambling Brazilian Noir, March 21, 2011

By 

Feanor (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Praise of Lies (Paperback)

If one accepts the thesis that pulp fiction addresses the needs of the newly literate who progress to more 'literary' forms as they grow increasingly comfortable and sophisticated with reading, it would be clear that in developing countries like Brazil, cheap and cheerful dime novels would be extremely popular. In this darkly satirical book 'In Praise of Lies' Patricia Melo does not address the consumers of this inexpensive literature; rather, she prefers to poke fun at the industry that supplies it. So we have Jose Gruber, a hack who copies the plots from greats of world literature and passes on the texts to a publisher who is unaware of Dickens and Dostoevsky; the readership doesn't know or care either. Jose falls in with a herpetologist, Melissa, who, unaware of his inspiration, believes that his is a fertile imagination. She then involves him in concocting clever plots of kill her husband, who she claims abuses her, and Jose is such a moral and physical coward that he ends up helping her. The stress results in his literary career stalling, with the publisher rejecting proposal after proposal (which lengthen in proportion to his desperation) as unworkable and uninteresting. The noirish aspects of the novel might have served to keep the plot ticking, but Melo is dissatisfied with satirising only the pulp industry and she switches her target to the self-help books that also attract a wide readership in Brazil. Between the crime committed and the unravelling of Melissa's and Jose's relationship, and his sudden success as a hack self-help author, there are suddenly too many threads in the novel, and it all gets increasingly inchoate. While the book started funny and clever, it appears towards the end as if Melo loses the plot herself. Worth a casual read, certainly.

4.0 out of 5 stars A delightful short read, May 28, 2006

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Praise of Lies (Paperback)

This is a crime novel, a noir novel, a pleasant amusement. The protagonist is a hack writer whose communications with his publisher(s) serve to introduce several chapters. These memos add a humorous second plot line to the story itself. Love and murder circle around each other in this tale, with the after-effects of murder being more powerful than murder itself. Decent characters, decent plot, a modum of suspense and a pleasant afternoon read.