Customer Reviews

In Praise of Lies

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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!

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.

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.