This mesmerizing novel, first published in 1989, marks the debut in English of one of the most brilliant and admired of today's Latin American writers. A family's history is told as the clan gathers at the matriarch's deathbed.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A major South American novelist's debut in English, this novel is a stupendous work, literature of a high order. Even Pinon's penchant for incomplete sentences, irritating at first, comes to seem right (are there subjects and predicates in dreams?). It's a four-generational family drama quite unlike the loping family sagas we are so accustomed to. The central figures, who give structure to this vast familial, sociological, psychological and political panorama, are Madruga, iron-willed, complex patriarch of the clan, who immigrated in his youth to Brazil from Spain, and his elderly wife Eulalia, dying as the story starts. The republic of dreams is Brazil--mysterious, cruel, sensual, not yet conquered imaginatively by its people, themselves an explosive mix of Americans, Europeans and Africans. The republic is also the human mind, wherein realities are shaped by dreams that stretch forward and backward. The story is of Brazil and Spain, winners and losers, the endless clashes of will between the soul-devouring Madruga and his extended family, and the shock of tragedy, the whole haunted by the insight that words never precisely correspond to feelings. Every page holds memorable observations. One example: "Her ambition, smoldering in damp, half-closed eyes, corrupted everyone." The Amazonian plenitude of Pinon's imagination puts her in the category of genius.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Here is another multigenerational Latin American saga, this time about immigrants from Spanish Galicia to Brazil. Paterfamilias Madruga has made good, acquiring showy objects of wealth as fast as he amasses his fortune. Now that his wife Eulalia is dying, he takes stock of the family they have produced and finds them amorphous, spineless creatures who leave him cold--except for granddaughter Breta, who accompanies him on a trip back to Spain and who agrees to write a book about the family's ordeal of emigration. In their transplantation from lush and green Galicia to the desolate urban shores of Brazil, something vital has been lost, and a deep longing for the past and for the Old World permeates the book. The writing itself is characterized by the use of elliptical sentences, otherwise called fragments. For Latin American enthusiasts.
- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Jack Shreve, Allegany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An astounding book by the best living Brazilian novelist,
This book captures the struggles of 3 generations- from Galicia to Brazil. Pinon moves effortlessly across the Atlantic and across time, and at once manages to create an epic, broad story through narrow, penetrating, and profound narratives. She mixes the holy with the profane, commentary on politics with domestic anecdotes. Her book feels like life: a mixture of hope and disappointments, a bubbling cauldron where reality and dreams comingle and flavor each other.
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