A list of books that introduces some of the characters who populate the sprawling, multi-faceted country, curated by our Brazil correspondent
McLaren along the same road as a cyclist, when a collision between the two leaves the latter’s body scattered across the highway. It is only the beginning of the drama. Alex Cuadros’s book is a vibrant telling of Brazil’s wealthiest people and of the country itself. Billionaires became wealthy by siphoning off public funds meant for roads and schools, but are still voted into office because, in a well-known phrase, they “rob but get things done” .
The centrepiece of this collection of 12 stories by Fábio Zuker, a journalist, is the telling of a real event: when a six-tonne minke whale became stranded in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. But this book is really about the people who live there, and how they are responding to a rapidly changing environment—from deforestation to flooding, from the covid-19 pandemic to the incursions of illegal gold miners. Indigenous groups usetechnology to mark the boundaries of their territory.
“The Sun on My Head” is a snapshot of life in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. In his first book, Geovani Martins, a writer and favela resident, shares stories of drugs and corrupt police, but also of a butterfly accidentally coated in cooking oil. It took translator Julia Sanches 36 drafts to translate Mr Martins’s prose into English. Somehow the translator had to preserve the argot of Rio and make sure not to lose the flow of the sound of the street.Rutgers University Press; 224 pages; $31.
Carolina Maria de Jesus, a woman who attended school for only two years, is the author of this diary that sold over 1m copies worldwide after its publication in 1998. Between 1958 and 1966, this resident of a favela in São Paulo wrote about her daily life as a mother and waste-picker, as well as her thoughts on social inequalities, blackness, and Brazil.
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