brazil john updike book review

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by John Updike ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 1994

The indefatigable Updike only occasionally succeeds here. Tristo, a black teenager from the favela, encounters Isabel, a rich and sheltered young daughter of the elite, one afternoon on Rio's Copacabana beach—and when Isabel takes him home and gives her maidenhead to him, both kids discover a love union like that of their storied counterparts, Romeo and Juliet. With Tristo, Isabel flees Rio, ahead of her father's armed posse, and they make it as far as So Paulo. There, Isabel is wrenched away—but this is only the first of a number of forced (and false) partings, around which, together, Isabel and Tristo will turn to gold-mining, prostitution, living among jungle Indians, and finally re-civilization. Isabel will even resort to the help of magic to have Tristo returned to her, at the price of a shaman-induced change in respective skin-colors for them both—Updike's woolliest turn in a story fanciful with twists and turns, touristy aperáus, and sexual philosophy. Like a slab of abused plywood, the novel is forever coming apart into its separate laminates. Updike at times (especially when he's trying to write suspenseful scenes, or violent ones) seems to be using the exotic foreignness of his setting as an excuse for over-vividness, somewhat like Karl May's old German romances of the American Indian. Elsewhere, more cunningly, he seems to be subverting some of Latin-American magic realism's more bloated clichÇs by overturning them into a kind of realistic-magic fiction. But, again, as in the African-based The Coup, he seems to think he needs another continent to try to tell the story of a wholly other—and maybe to tell a story, period. The Updikean intelligence and draughtsmanship and sex-awe constantly obtrude, weakening the narrative big picture, studding the book with perceptions and alertness galore but never with quite the air of exotic metaphysical enchantment the novelist seems to seek. Saul Bellow's finest book, Henderson the Rain King, is still unchallenged as the only American novel of our era to do that.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 1994

ISBN: 0-679-43071-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993

GENERAL FICTION

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by John Updike edited by Christopher Carduff

by John Updike

TRUE COLORS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2009

Above-average formula fiction, making full display of the author’s strong suits: sense of place, compassion for characters...

Female rivalry is again the main preoccupation of Hannah’s latest Pacific Northwest sob saga ( Firefly Lane , 2008, etc.).

At Water’s Edge, the family seat overlooking Hood Canal, Vivi Ann, youngest and prettiest of the Grey sisters and a champion horsewoman, has persuaded embittered patriarch Henry to turn the tumbledown ranch into a Western-style equestrian arena. Eldest sister Winona, a respected lawyer in the nearby village of Oyster Shores, hires taciturn ranch hand Dallas Raintree, a half-Native American. Middle sister Aurora, stay-at-home mother of twins, languishes in a dull marriage. Winona, overweight since adolescence, envies Vivi, whose looks get her everything she wants, especially men. Indeed, Winona’s childhood crush Luke recently proposed to Vivi. Despite Aurora’s urging (her principal role is as sisterly referee), Winona won’t tell Vivi she loves Luke. Yearning for Dallas, Vivi stands up Luke to fall into bed with the enigmatic, tattooed cowboy. Winona snitches to Luke: engagement off. Vivi marries Dallas over Henry’s objections. The love-match triumphs, and Dallas, though scarred by child abuse, is an exemplary father to son Noah. One Christmas Eve, the town floozy is raped and murdered. An eyewitness and forensic evidence incriminate Dallas. Winona refuses to represent him, consigning him to the inept services of a public defender. After a guilty verdict, he’s sentenced to life without parole. A decade later, Winona has reached an uneasy truce with Vivi, who’s still pining for Dallas. Noah is a sullen teen, Aurora a brittle but resigned divorcée. Noah learns about the Seattle Innocence Project. Could modern DNA testing methods exonerate Dallas? Will Aunt Winona redeem herself by reopening the case? The outcome, while predictable, is achieved with more suspense and less sentimental histrionics than usual for Hannah.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-312-36410-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008

GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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by J.D. Salinger

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BOOK REVIEW / A wild holiday romance: 'Brazil' - John Updike: Hamish Hamilton, 15.99

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Great writers are entitled to their holidays like everybody else - it's just that you can't always depend on what they're going to smuggle back through duty-free. John Updike has been flying down to Rio, and Brazil is the strange fruit of his sojourn, a novel that mixes old-fashioned love story with New World parable. If this is a brave attempt to give his readers something they might not expect, then it's also perilously close to something they might not like either.

It opens on the sunstruck bustle of Copacabana beach, where Tristao Raposo, a young black street hood, meets Isabel Leme, a younger upper-class white girl. He gives her a signet ring, stolen from a gringa tourist, and she invites him back to her uncle's baronial apartment. It's safe to say they're hot for each other, and before you can say 'that's amore' a sizzling Updikean bedroom scene is underway. Tristao 'felt his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam', on which exotic tuber Isabel eagerly loses her virginity. Love is professed on both sides, but their wrong-side-of-the- tracks romance comes a cropper on the reef of social propriety. Isabel's uncle alerts her absent diplomat father once the lovers go on the lam, and hired goons track them down to their bolt-hole in Sao Paulo. Isabel is led back to the cossetted prison of home, but after two years at university in Brasilia she is reunited one day with Tristao, and again they escape, this time to the jungly embrace of Brazil's wild west.

It will not take the reader very long to discern in this accelerated sequence of union, separation and flight the lineaments of a fairytale. And a myth: Updike's model is the legend of Tristan and Iseult, prototype victims of doomed love. After a bright beginning the author tilts an ominous shade on his story, forcing the star-crossed lovers to struggle for their lives against the savage privations of the country, 'with its atrocious history, its sordid stupid masses, its eternal underdevelopment, its samba on the edge of chaos'. Following three years' hard labour in a gold mine for Tristao, and the same in a brothel for Isabel, they retreat into the treacherous Mato Grosso, losing various children and taking their chances with poisonous roots, teeming insects and vampire bats. As if that isn't enough, they also appear to have fetched up in an ancient time-zone, where brutish tribes and dwarfish Indians lurk at every turn; the pair eventually fall into the untender hands of throwback Portuguese bandeirantes, who throw shackles on Tristao and marry off Isabel to one of their chiefs.

That the story forages in the landscape of magic realism is appropriate to a novel set in Brazil: the genre is closely associated with the volatility and romanticism of Latin America. That it is John Updike doing the foraging is something of a mystery: a master realist aiming for the hazy fugues of magic realism seems highly perverse, like a concert pianist playing an accordion. Martin Amis once hailed Updike as 'a writer who can do more or less as he likes', a facility which can, of course, be blithely abused, as many who have read S or The Coup or even last year's Memories of the Ford Administration will testify. It is perfectly inevitable that a writer of such range will cast his net wide, yet it is arguable that the further Updike strays from his personal domain - adultery and disillusion in the somnolent suburbs of New England - the less successful he is. Whether in the Buddhist ashram in S or the African state in The Coup, one felt the slightly bored playfulness of a writer trying to entertain himself, the head brimful of research but the heart not fully engaged.

So it is with Brazil. Even Updike's stock in trade is showing marks of fatigue. What has always been a source of alarmed delight in his work is the unabashed gaze he fixes on sex and its comedy of sly second-guessing and desperate connivance. Here the eye constantly snags on bizarre descriptions of sexual organs; he is particularly fond of that 'yam' of Tristao's, and Isabel fares little better with 'her semi-seen, furry, rousing cranny' (more furry tail than fairytale); put them together and you get 'two exotic flowers so contrarily evolved'. Nor do you have to be a keen combatant in gender politics, or whatever you want to call it, to feel affronted by a phrase like 'the criminal bliss of rape'. Updike is too canny not to realise how close to the wind he's sailing, but his penchant for the idea of woman-as-sperm-receptacle is not one even his admirers are much inclined to defend.

As for the famously lush prose style, it's barely allowed an outing. At one point Isabel's remote father is described as speaking Portuguese with a 'flavourless neutrality' after his peregrinations as an ambassador: 'He knew so many other languages that his mind was always translating; his tongue had no home.' A nice observation, and pertinent to this book, which itself has the slightly stilted manner of a translation. Updike keeps trotting out gnomic locutions like 'Too much courage becomes the love of death' and 'It takes a sad childhood to make us eager to be adult', which have a flavourless, not to mention pointless, neutrality all of their own. There's also a moment of authorial intrusion, with Updike acting as a sort of benign chorus: 'Though this chapter covers the greatest stretch of time, let it be no longer than it is]' A hearty amen to that.

And what of Brazil itself? We must assume that Updike harbours some affection for this huge, harsh country, if only in the loving, meticulous detail with which he conjures the acreage of forest and swamp and scrub. Animal and vegetable life is faithfully logged too, yielding further proof of Updike's casual genius for assimilating vast tracts of knowledge. Where previously he might have unfurled a litany of different beers and made it sound like a religious incantation, here he describes jungle delicacies with a touch of Elizabeth David: 'the purplish, cherry-sized fruit of the araca, which smells of turpentine and makes the saliva in one's mouth fizz, and the pods of the inga which are stuffed with sweet-tasting down, and wild pineapples whose flesh abounds in big black seeds and tastes of raspberry, and the pears called bacuri and that even greater delicacy named the acai, which overnight curdles into a fruity cheese'.

What doesn't get much of a look-in is the human side; Updike sets his amorous pair against a squalid backdrop of bandits and crooks, whores, pimps and rapacious peasants. His take on the place reminded me of P J O'Rourke's quip about Florida: a careful reading of the novel will do more to damage the Brazilian tourist trade than anything except an actual visit to Brazil. It's a case of don't go out after dark, don't drink the water and don't talk to anyone carrying a cut-throat razor.

In the end its hope of racial harmony, even of miscegenation, seems a vain fancy. Despite much energetic coupling - and several children - Isabel never conceives by Tristao's seed. All of the old prejudices and stereotypes are left in place at the story's bitter, and beautifully orchestrated, conclusion. Brazil overall is a disappointment, but it should be put in perspective. Within the Updike oeuvre, it's just a postcard in a gallery of modern masters. Won't somebody tell him to stay at home?

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David Louis Edelman

Science Fiction Author of the JUMP 225 Trilogy

John Updike’s “Brazil”

Write a score of enthusiastically received novels, break sexual and racial taboos, and successfully subvert literary conventions, and you might think you can do anything.

Only a writer with as many accolades under his belt as John Updike could write a book like Brazil , the sixteenth novel by the New England writer and certainly one of his most daring. All at once, Brazil seeks to be an interracial love story, a time-shattering fable, and a sociological treatise. Remarkably, Updike nearly succeeds in all three.

The novel chronicles the twenty-year relationship between white, upper-class beauty Isabel and black, fatherless thief Tristao, from their initial meeting on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro to their flight through South America and eventual return. It’s a novel with a strange narrative structure, one that will occasionally leapfrog several years in a single sentence without warning.

From the instant Tristao and Isabel catch sight of each other, they fall deeply and irreversibly in love, the type of instantaneous love that can only happen in novels. Although racial tension doesn’t run as deeply in Brazil as in the United States, Isabel’s bourgeois father (a government ambassador) doesn’t approve of her giving her future to a penniless thief born from a prostitute. As if the difference in races weren’t enough, Updike exaggerates the social gap to mythical proportions: Tristao’s mother literally rolls around in darkness and filth numbed to the world by drink, while Isabel bathes in showers with adjustable water nozzles and luxurious towels.

The two decide to flee the wrath of Isabel’s father and his men and construct their own future together, in a journey which involves multiple losses of innocence for them both. Isabel becomes initiated in the dark pleasures of sex as well as the toils of life in the lower classes; Tristao learns that there is more to living life than caring for one’s self.

Soon Brazil moves from the merely implausible to the highly ridiculous. Tristao and Isabel meander from the squalor of gold mining to the hunger of wandering the South American deserts to slavery at the hands of a troop of colonial fanatics. Isabel experiments with prostitution and motherhood and lesbianism, while Tristao vacillates between protector and provider and delinquent.

Updike’s most preposterous twist occurs when Tristao and Isabel switch races with the help of an old shaman’s magic. This transformation allows for a series of reflections on the nature of the races which skitters dangerously close to (and sometimes crosses over) the line of offensiveness. Updike, not content to skim along the surface of black and white love, brings out the deepest taboos between the races: master and slave relationships, differences in genitalia, social standing. He writes of the Africanized Isabel at one point as “not a social and spiritual equal but a thing of the flesh, imported from afar.”

Such statements, however, don’t really convey the racist message they might seem to at first glance. What Updike is really trying to do is capture the thought processes which lead to the tyrannical racial prejudices which enslave us all. It is Tristao and Isabel’s triumph that they can transmute the wedge that divides them into the source of pleasure which keeps their love strong and vibrant.

0 thoughts on “John Updike’s “Brazil””

This novel is a good, but not great work. The American author attempts to tell his audience things about Brazil. But by moving “from the merely implausible to the highly ridiculous” he loses some credibility. At times, it feels he bite off more than he could chew.

I thought this novel was really good. It drew you into the characters and made you feel their struggle. I’m not sure it would have the same effect on everyone, considering the the relationship i’m currently in where neither family approves. Overall though, I think its a great read.

I liked the novel so much that I translated it into my mother tongue. Why does Mr Corbett and some others demand from the late Mr Updike that he should have stuck strictly to the magical realism of the S-America in certain parts of the book, as in changing the races, or the like? Has J.U. given some oath to do it? He didn’t have to! In fact, he couldn’t do it, for the novel is, all in all, a piece of irony whereas the magical realism is not; in fact it seems he’s laughing at it. His irony in this book has more than one layer. In the final chapter, every layer is brought to its end.

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Monday, December 30, 2013

• Book Review: Brazil by John Updike

8 comments:

I never heard of this one! Interesting! I keep thinking I'll reread the Rabbit books again now that I'm older, but so far haven't done it. I remember enjoying The Witches of Eastwick, although I was more forgiving of sexism in authors back them, but I don't know what the consensus of the literary critics was on it...

See, I don't know a lot about Updike in general, but the comments in this post make me think I should do a little research...like re: sexism and such...hmmmm.

Updike and I have a rocky relationship based on an essay I read in college. But this really sounds like an interesting book! I've never heard of it before, so thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Interested what type of article it was that you read? I don't know a lot about Updike in general.

I have a copy of Gertrude and Claudius that I DNF'd about a thousand years ago. Such is the extent of my experience with Updike. I should probably give him another shot.

Hmmm never heard of that one...will be sure to avoid :)

I actually really love magical realism and am also trying to read more books set in other countries, so this might go on my TBR list. I'm not big on graphic violence and sex though, so I'll have to think about it. I don't know anything about Updike, but I'm glad you enjoyed your first experience with his work :)

Yeah definitely a lot of violence/sex...you might want another choice in this category if that's not a go for you!

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John Updike New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994 ISBN # 0-679-43071-7 260 pages.

Desire Under the Palms Date: February 6, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By Barbara Kingsolver; Lead: BRAZIL By John Updike . 260 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $23. Text: TRISTAO and Isabel, the hero and heroine of John Updike's 16th novel, " Brazil ," never quite realize the epic valor of their namesakes of medieval legend and Wagnerian drama. They mean well, but they just can't seem to resist silk shirts and kinky sex. The knight-errant Tristao is strutting the Copacabana beach in his shining armor of night-black skin when he first lays eyes on pale Isabel, in her bikini and rich-girl languor. "This dolly," he declares. "I think she was made for me." With a razor blade in his pocket and the vague sense that he has outgrown a life of crime, Tristao makes his way to her, pledging his devotion with a D.A.R. ring previously snatched from an elderly North American tourist. Thus begins a new life of crime, for their love will force Tristao and Isabel to break all the rules of class, race and social convention. Even so, Tristao has a hard time giving up prostitutes and his razor blade. Isabel develops a habit of stealing family heirlooms to finance her marriage, and she shrugs off a lifetime of infidelity by reasoning that her spirit has remained true. In an afterword, Mr. Updike cites Joseph Bedier's "Romance of Tristan and Iseult," which he says gave him his tone. But these new lovers seem to have more in common with Othello and Desdemona, Romeo and Juliet, and perhaps Sean Penn and Madonna. They are not merely doomed but also adolescent and wildly foolish. To say that they loved "not wisely but too well" is in this case a kind of comic understatement. The author has left his favored fictional terrain, the metaphorical deserts and jungles of suburban American marriage, for the very real deserts and jungles of class-engraved Brazil . The novel recalls an earlier work, "The Coup," which was set in the mythical African nation of Kush. Because " Brazil " lacks the gentle, trenchant realism that is Mr. Updike's trademark and glory, it may at first seem slight to his seasoned fans. Some readers will also, undoubtedly, grow tired of the onslaught of rape fantasy and racist imagery. The novel is thoroughly salted with phrases to make the politically sensitive reader cringe: in their fantastic journey across the Brazilian hinterlands, the lovers encounter innumerable varieties of so-called Indians who scowl and steal children or flee "with the unembarrassed cowardice of savages." There are ubiquitous references to Tristao's "yam," the organ that arises (so to speak) as the book's central character, and whose monstrous size is explicitly linked with Tristao's African ancestry. But a writer of Mr. Updike's accomplishment cannot be dismissed without a hearing. " Brazil ," for all its political incorrectness, seems good-natured and bent on self-parody, in exactly the same way his Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom -- especially in the last of the series, "Rabbit at Rest" -- winds up personifying flawed maleness. My own many volumes of Mr. Updike's work have their margins blotted with scrawled protests -- mainly the question, "Does he expect to get away with this?" He does, and he will. Whatever one feels about Mr. Updike's world view, it is hard to resist the depth of his mind and the seduction of his prose. Once again, in " Brazil ," that prose is measured, layered, insightful, smooth, as addictive a verbal drug as exists on the modern market. For every tiresome appearance of Tristao's yam, there is also an image or observation that seems, against all odds, to mark the arrival of something new in the English language. MR. UPDIKE'S characterizations are quick and deadly. All the many people who move outside the sanctified love zone of Tristao and Isabel are minor but unforgettable. Cesar, the hired hit man, lectures Isabel on morality and Brazilian history as he kidnaps her ("The Portuguese did not bring to the New World the discipline and austerity that the Spanish did," he explains. "If we were not as cruel as they were . . . it was because we were too lazy to have an ideology"), and he outlines his plan to retire and become an eco-tour guide: "Only Siberia and the Sahara can rival Brazilian vastness," he points out, "and they have deplorable climates." Isabel's widowed father is also a standout, as the impeccable, slavish diplomat whose "flavorless" Portuguese and melting profile play counterpoint to his daughter's Brazilian willfulness. "He knew so many other languages," she observes during one of his paternal lectures, "that his mind was always translating; his tongue had no home." The practical old man explains to her that love is a dream, "as all but the dreamers can see," then adds, "It is the anesthetic nature employs to extract babies from us." We recognize the voice as authorial, even as we refuse to believe what it says. Tristao's mother is perhaps overdone, even for tragicomedy, as the torpid, whoring slattern. But his brother and sister-in-law are splendidly drawn as they claw their way to the middle in the industrial suburbs of Sao Paulo. "Chiquinho and Polidora seemed to him a couple crouching as they moved down a narrow corridor, with flaking paint and leaking walls, bumping their heads every time they tried to straighten up, never coming to the large room they envisioned. . . . Instead, they had this long apprehensive creep together under flickering light bulbs, while their bones turned brittle, their skin shriveled, and their hair fell out." True love promises the way out of every prison: deprivation or materialism, crime or innocence, blackness or whiteness, ignorance or pedagogy. As Isabel and Tristao flee their disapproving families and run westward from Brazil 's colonized shore, they also move backward through time, through Brazil 's colonial history, past mestizos and Indians and even a lost band of Portuguese conquerors, until the imposed covenants of class are irrelevant and no longer keep them separate. If they could have stopped there, Tristao and Isabel would have slipped through the cracks of tragedy. But they are better than this. In their sunbaked life of hardship, they gradually merge. Then, in an act of primordial magic, they move through and beyond the gulf that once divided them. When they come out standing on opposite shores, Isabel and Tristao have changed places. "Black," the book's opening line promises, "is a shade of brown. So is white, if you look." Passionate love is the embodiment of empathy. The promise is fulfilled. If the book's surface is sometimes a little sticky, its allegorical underpinnings are graceful and firm -- and maddeningly circular. In the folds of a mythic, slightly funky love story, the magician John Updike has concealed layers of contradictory acknowledgment of the workings of the world. In the very last moment, he transcends wisecracks and holds fast to drama. " Brazil " is the tribute of a man in his 60's -- a little cynical by reputation -- to the youthful religion of love. BY the time everyone has had a chance to sing, this "Tristan and Isolde" is an operatic lament for the things we leave behind, as nations and as animal selves. The story pivots on the moment when Isabel must give up the D.A.R. ring, in a bizarre sacrifice through which she both saves and loses Tristao and herself. "Heartsick, she slipped off the inscribed ring and set it in the shaman's cupped hand. . . . As if a tooth had been knocked from her face, she knew she would never get back what she had just surrendered. Life robs us of ourselves, piece by small piece. What is eventually left is someone else." And of course, the author might remind us here, with a wink, that ring was stolen in the first place. THE BURDEN OF LOVE Perilous and strange though her situation was, Isabel felt luxuriously sleepy, after the hectic escape from Ipanema and the run along Copacabana Beach and the long climb up the morro, where the favela hung like a frozen avalanche in moonlight. Tristao's body was hard and vigilant beside hers, and he had given her, to pillow her face in, a wadded rag musky with a smell of another's sweat; an intestinal space curved close about her, murmuring with this omnipresent drunken mother's blood and breath. Her lover was tense. . . . Nevertheless nothing kept her from sleeping, amid these warm entrails of squalor, while her husband (so he now seemed) turned tensely beside her, plotting their future in the inky blackness. When she awoke, day declared itself in the blue knives of light suspended about her, each with its halo of smoke. Someone was cooking -- a girl, 12 or 13, squatting to a fire over which was propped a round oil-drum lid, for a stove top, near the ragged doorway for ventilation. Isabel recognized the smells as coffee and angu, corncakes made mostly with water and salt. Other bodies were stirring; she recognized, from that day at the beach, the squat form of Euclides as it moved in the gray dawn light. He looked in her direction but did not seem to see her. Tristao showed her the room from which excrement slid down the hill. After his troubled night he seemed thinner, and older, like a piece of smoked meat, and the black of his skin duller. It saddened her to see that his acquisition of her had so soon proved a withering burden. She now thought, in her innocence, that if she could form an alliance with his mother it would lessen his burden. Ursula was still in her bed; a little man lay beside her, on the wide and dirty, sweetly stinking straw-stuffed pallet, still unconscious, with his face pressed against her side like a dark leech. His matted hair had gray in it; his face was eclipsed by the great brown breast which sagged sideways in Ursula's torn cotton dress. Her skin was a sludgy bistre quite without Tristao's shimmer of African blue. . . . The whites of Ursula's eyes had been yellowed and curdled by drink, and some of her teeth were missing. "White girl, what you want here?" she asked, seeing Isabel standing at her feet. "Tristao brought me. My family want to part us." "Smart folks. You two pure crazy." From " Brazil ." 'I MADE IT UP' What did John Updike, chronicler of Pennsylvanians in their row houses and New Englanders in their saltboxes, know of Brazil , sorcery, shamans? Mr. Updike answered in a telephone interview from his home in Beverly, Mass.: "I made it up." Mr. Updike was exaggerating, uncharacteristically. Having conceived the story of " Brazil " during a week's visit there two years ago, he delved into his sources: Claude Levi-Strauss's "Tristes Tropiques," John Hemming's "Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians" and many more -- even images of the favelas in the 1959 movie "Black Orpheus." Then, too, he said, "there's ample precedent for writing about places you've never been." Mr. Updike thought it would be helpful to a writer like himself, "who has a tendency to write down whatever his mind's eye sees," to concoct "more of an adventure tale than I usually write: would Edgar Rice Burroughs have been able to invent Tarzan if he'd known a lot about Africa?" So, in part for the thrill of invention, Mr. Updike -- who also wrote about Africa "and made up a whole country," as he puts it, in "The Coup" -- led his lovers into an unexplored area of the planet. Brazil , he said, "still has an enormous hinterland which is mysterious," mysterious to most middle-class residents of its east coast, even more than the Nebraska prairie is to your average New Yorker." And he found that for all their resemblance to Americans, those urban Brazilians live in a "very magical country." "The interest in fables is part of Brazilian nature," he added. "Maybe this story could have taken place just as easily in Canada, but I think not." It was Mr. Updike's unmagical Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom who took him to Brazil . His publisher there was bringing out all four Rabbit novels in a new translation, and invited him for interviews in Sao Paulo. Mr. Updike then ventured north, to Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and a backwater 18th-century mining town. A few months later he set to work on Tristao and Isabel. "I found as I worked on ' Brazil ' that I grew quite fond of my hero and heroine," he said. "You shouldn't be put off by the magic. Everything that happens in a book is magic. There's this terrible freedom that fictional characters have." After all, he added, "Rabbit was in a way as much a fantasy as ' Brazil .' " LAURA MANSNERUS

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The 10 Best John Updike Books

Christopher Carduff, who was handpicked by John Updike to edit the Library of America edition of his work, also edits the posthumous Updike publications for Knopf, the latest of which, John Updike: Selected Poems, will be published this month. We asked Mr. Carduff to choose ten of his favorite books by Updike in a variety of genres.

1. Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy - Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest: this series epitomizes for many readers their experience of Updike—indeed their experience of the postwar American novel. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, an ex–high school basketball player on uneasy terms with the responsibilities of adulthood, is a creature in constant motion: he perceives, he reacts, he leaps out of harm’s way— and then, immediately facing some new hazard (usually of his own making), he is forced to leap again. He lives, with a kind of animal grace, in an eternal present tense; his senses are sharper than ours, his life force stronger, even though his thoughts are more confused and more troubled by ineffable longing. None of Updike’s contemporaries created a more representative American protagonist, and none, not even Nabokov, could match Updike when it came to pinning down those grand and gaudy butterflies that were the American Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. Read these books in the definitive Everyman omnibus edition of 1995, which features a fascinating introduction by the author.

2. Olinger Stories: A Selection - If the Rabbit series gives us Updike at his “hottest,” at his most ambitious and improvisatory, his New Yorker short stories present us with an artist of opposite temperament. Here is the work of an exquisite miniaturist, a cool, controlled Vermeer who paints domestic scenes on small canvases in tiny, deliberate, gorgeously colored brushstrokes. This book, a selection by the author from his early autobiographical stories, mythologizes, in 11 episodes, his boyhood in small-town Pennsylvania during the 1940s. It includes at least two works, “Pigeon Feathers” and “The Happiest I’ve Been,” that, had Updike written nothing else, would guarantee his immortality as a master of the American short story.

3. Of the Farm - This pastoral for four voices—an aging farm widow, her visiting fortyish son, his new (second) wife, and his 11-year-old stepchild—ranks with So Long, See You Tomorrow and The Ghost Writer among the very few near-perfect postwar American novellas. The mute sandstone farmhouse that witnesses the unfolding of an emotionally fraught family weekend is one of Updike’s many settings with all the presence of a human character.

4. The Maples Stories - In his scenes from the marriage of Joan and Richard Maple (“Snowing in Greenwich Village,” “Separating”), Updike created, more memorably and more tenderly than he did in Couples , enduring emblems of American adultery, divorce, and their aftermath. “That a marriage ends is less than ideal,” Updike writes in a preface, “but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed.”

5. The Witches of Eastwick - Updike’s comic triumph of 1984, which features not one but three of his best drawn female characters, was the original “paranormal romance.” It is the tale of Darryl Van Horne, a vulgar, hairy, petty demon newly arrived in a gossip-ridden Rhode Island port town, who, by harnessing the powers of a coven of comely and comradely witches, works some very real evil on certain “deserving” members of the local populace. Read Witches in tandem with its sequel, the underrated Widows of Eastwick (2009): the two novels, like the three witches, gain magic from their proximity to one another.

6. In the Beauty of the Lilies - This multi-generational saga, published in 1996, is my favorite of Updike’s later novels. Michiko Kakutani thought this story—a working-out-through-the-flesh of the American fever dreams of Protestant fundamentalism, Hollywood fantasy, and utopian social idealism—even more historically and sociologically ambitious than the Rabbit cycle. “In charting the fortunes of an American family through some 80 years,” she wrote, “[Updike] showed how dreams, habits, and predilections are handed down generation to generation, parent to child, even as he created a kaleidoscopic portrait of this country from its nervous entry into the 20th century to its stumbling approach to the millennium."

7. Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams - On September 28, 1960, Red Sox slugger Ted Williams swung his bat one last time in Boston’s Fenway Park. He hit a home run—a storybook ending to a storied career—and Updike was there to capture it, in what no less an authority than Roger Angell has called “the best baseball essay ever.” In 2010, on the 50 th anniversary of Ted’s legendary homer, The Library of America reprinted Updike’s single foray into sports reporting, together with a memorial tribute, “Ted Williams, 1918–2002.” Updike’s fannish identification with Williams, an artist who put his heart into his work every time he approached the plate, is palpable in every line.

8. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism - If Updike donned the sportswriter’s eyeshade as a one-time-only lark, he assumed the tweed jacket of the literary journalist as a kind of daily public uniform. After 1960 he dominated the Books pages of The New Yorker , publishing more than 400 reviews and essays there over the next five decades. Of his six oversized collections of criticism, Hugging the Shore , which won a 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, seems to me the richest and strongest. Here are magisterial lectures on Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman; enduringly readable reviews of Nabokov, Bellow, and Cheever; and consummate examples of all the sorts of occasional writing Updike put his hand to, from humorous sketches and literary translations to definitive tributes to poets, theologians, astronomers, and movie stars.

9. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs - John Hoyer Updike’s unconventional memoirs consists of six Emersonian essays on deeply personal subjects: his coming to consciousness in small-town Pennsylvania; his Updike and Hoyer ancestors; his psoriasis; his stuttering; his conservative politics; his Protestant faith and his sense of being a “self” forever. This is not an autobiography, it is a meditation on John Updike’s life as “a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly uniquely lives in the world.” This is not confessional gossip, it is a study in being alive.

10. Endpoint and Other Poems - Updike’s first book, published in 1958, was a collection of verse, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures. His last book, too, was a volume of verse, Endpoint and Other Poems (2009). In these books and in the six collections of poetry that came between, Updike was frequently a “real” poet, not merely “also” a poet. Certain of his poems—“Seven Stanzas at Easter,” “Dog’s Death,” “A Rescue,” “Rats”—seem destined for a long life in standard poetry anthologies. But true lovers of poetry will, I think, come to treasure most the title poem of Endpoint , a chronicle, in supple and intimate blank-verse sonnets, of Updike’s final years that suddenly, with the last few devastating entries in the sequence, telescopes into an intimate journal of his final days.

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ISBN: 0679430717

ISBN13: 9780679430711

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Brazil Audio Cassette – Audiobook, February 8, 1994

• Language English
• Publisher Random House Audio
• Publication date February 8, 1994
• Dimensions 4.5 x 0.75 x 7 inches
• ISBN-10 0679432264
• ISBN-13 978-0679432265
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Audio (February 8, 1994)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679432264
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679432265
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.5 x 0.75 x 7 inches

About the author

John updike.

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

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