Customer Reviews

Rio de Janeiro (Writer and the City)

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

 

 

Rio is every carioca's mistress.

As a true lover of the city, I was amazed by Ruy Castro's profound and inspired view of Rio. He makes this book as interesting for someone just looking for a travel guide as for the most serious and passionate student of the city's soul.

Rio is more than just a beautiful accident of geography and history. This one place that, so stubbornly and yet, so rightfully calls itself "the wonderful city", like a being greater than its buildings, streets, beaches and mountains, is a major character of our lives.

This is no trivial book about Rio. Ruy Castro writes, in a good-humored and elegant style, a guide to the carioca soul: a fresh, original and colorful view of the city and the people that make it the best place to live in the world.

I first read Ruy Castro's 'Bossa Nova' and wanted more! Then I found this book, and loved it. I also went on to read Ruy Castro's next book (translated into English) Garrincha which is about a Futebol star. I am not into soccer but I loved the book.
I recommend this book.

Castro is a fair writer, presenting an honest view of the city. I've never been, so I cannot base this on my own experiences. The book presents a little bit of everything which seems to be central to Rio: the nightlife, Carnival, the cuisine and, most importantly for me, the history. The problem with small books such as this one, which in a standard layout would maybe top 130 pages, is that the writer is prohibited from straying from the main path of introducing the city to the reader. I would say this book is the equivalent of spending two days in a major city - seeing the major sights, creating opinions and generalizations without really getting to know any citizen or neighborhood too well. However, the book did succeed in what I took as its major goal: to get the reader to go to Rio. Brazil is now definitely near the top of my travel list.

Ruy Castro's chronicle of Rio takes you through the city's centuries long history to where it is today: the marvelous city. Castro has great wit and humor and has knack for telling a story. Excellent quick read before visiting Rio before the Carnival.

Ruy Castro's slim volume on Rio de Janeiro provides the casual reader a compelling portrait of that most intriguing of cities. Providing a rapid history of the city from the first Portuguese explorers to the celebrations of the dawn of the 21st century, he tells the tale of a city that has at times been the height of fashion, that has provided the world with at least its share of memorable movie scenes, more than its requisite portion of compelling rhythms, and a plentiful supply of legends, scandalous and otherwise.

Seemingly influenced by the flaneur approach to writing on cities (though not adopting the majority of that form's conventions) and with the long memory that comes of living in and loving a city for his whole natural life, Castro gives plentiful insight into a genteel experience of the city. He tells how Rio rose over its first few centuries, and then fell into the same morose situation that afflicted so many metropolises through the Cold War years, a conflation of the effects of over-exposure that turned an exciting, exclusive experience like early Copacobana into the banality of over-exposure, and a structuralist approach to cities that sucked them of life. Alongside the allusions to many a scandalous encounter, there are nods to the less glamorous aspects of Rio's underbelly, but the favelas, the drugs trade and Brazil's notorious crimeworld are skipped over with only the scantest of mentions.

Despite the vivid picture he draws, for all the talk of hypnotic rhythms, the book never quite grips the reader or imparts the carnival spirit on which its first half is almost entirely focussed. It may be that that detachment is telling of a divorce that has taken place between the Rio of legend and the Rio as experienced by a man who has lived through the city's awkward middle years and is still trying to work out a place in a new age, but it results in a less engaging book than one might hope this city would inspire. As a quick read, Rio is worth a look, but its not quite the mesmerising experience readers may be looking for.

Castro seems to work pretty hard at sounding like a real writer. The result is a lot of over-thought poeticisms, overstatements and generalizations for the sake of the book and at the expense of a real look at Rio. Crudely crafted and flippant at times.