Description

Author: Zulfikar Ghose
Publisher: Bantam Q7749
Year: 1973 Print: 1 Cover Price: $1.25
Condition: Very Good. Light  wear

Genre: Fiction Novel

SKU: 70124145E

Pages: 305

Brawling, bawdy, and picaresque, The Incredible Brazilian uses the opening of seventeenth-century Brazil as the setting for the adventures of one of literature’s least lovable but most likeable rogues: Gregório Peixoto da Silva Xavier.

The second son of a prosperous planter, Gregório is fourteen when the novel opens – a fop and a virgin, his self-esteem knows no bounds. Neither does his enterprise, and he soon rids himself of his unwanted innocence and embarks upon a series of wildly comic, wonderfully fantastical escapades.

By the novel’s end, Gregório has – if not honorably, then with great daring – made, lost, and made again several fortunes. Told with wry and mocking wit, Gregório’s life story is a delightfully outrageous ribald comedy, an absorbing and compelling adventure.

The Incredible Brazilian is the first volume in a trilogy that, following its hero through several incarnations, will culminate in the revolutionary politics of present-day Brazil.

In volume one, the exploration of this raw new land is a counterpoint to the extravagances of its hero. Here, Gregório and Brazil come together: young, violent, and rapacious, aping the manners of the Old World while pushing forward the frontiers of the New. As Gregório penetrates this vast country – from ostentatious plantations and gaudy cities to primitive Indian villages and rowdy mining camps, from slave quarter to prison to unmapped jungle – all the vitality and abrasiveness of a frontier society come fully and vividly to life.