Zulfikar Ghose

The Incredible Brazilian Zulfikar Ghose

The time is the 1970s. Brazil is ruled by a military dictatorship; terrorists, intellectuals and students have been arrested, there have been fearful accounts of torture. And Gregório, whose fate has been to be a central participant in this history of Brazil, finds his twentieth-century incarnation the most hazardous of all. The urban guerillas cannot be sure if he is not an informer while the Government suspects him of subtle duplicity. Thus, Gregório finds himself as the outsider whose destiny is to prevent, or at least delay the barbarians, both of the revolution and of the counter-revolution, from taking over. Gregório is now involved in an extraordinary drama that sees him as a powerful symbol of modern man struggling against the political chaos of his time. Some historical events - the military revolution in 1694, the kidnapping of the U. S. Ambassador, terrorist bank robberies - form the background to this novel. But Gregório's story is also a story of personal passion for his mysteriously inscrutable mistress Amália and a passion, too, for the idea of Brazil which is more than the territory of a nation. The two passions sometimes coincide and sometimes draw apart: Gregório can never be sure whether in possessing Amália he has not possessed Brazil and losing her whether he has not seen the dream of a perfect world - that 'Brazil' of his mind - disappear. The witty, rich prose of this novel in which the world is brought alive in a language of sensuous vitality makes this a very compelling book to read. To bring the complicated plot together and at the same time to release a world of ideas in the reader's mind, the author has created a prose of equal complexity which in itself will give a profound pleasure to many readers. Praise for The Incredible Brazilian Trilogy: 'A picaresque prose epic of Brazilian history written by a Pakistani-born British poet who lives in Texas could not fail to be remarkable. The Incredible Brazilian is also genuinely comic, truly wise, and altogether fascinating' Thomas Berger '... a considerable feat of the imagination and novelistic ventriloquism' Paul Theroux