My German Brother
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Ciccio already has many problems: romantic failure, an older brother who seems intent on breaking the heart of every beautiful woman in São Paulo, a distant and larger-than-life father. When Ciccio finds, among the many of his father’s books that line the walls of their house, a troubling letter dated ‘December 21, 1931. Berlin’, his existential crisis only intensifies.
It seems that his father once had a child with another woman – a German son whose fate remains unclear. Ciccio sets out on a mission to locate his lost half-brother, and to win the respect of his father. But as Brazil's military government cracks down on dissent, and rumours of arrests and disappearances spread, while Ciccio has been out looking for his German brother, he finds that he has taken his eye off his immediate family . . .
In writing My German Brother, acclaimed Brazilian novelist and musician Chico Buarque was driven by the desire to find out what happened to his own German half-brother – whether he survived the war in a bomb-ravaged Berlin, whether he had joined the ranks of the Hitler Youth. His novel has been a project of a lifetime, one that makes use of what happened, what might have happened, and pure imagination, in order to weave together the threads of narrative and arrive at a truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brazilian writer-musician Buarque's wistful, bawdy account of the search for his German half-brother is based on the author's life, according to an author's note. In early-1960s S o Paulo, teenager Ciccio de Hollander discovers hidden in an old book a 1931 letter revealing that his father left an illegitimate child behind in prewar Berlin. Enthralled, he imagines his half-brother while trying to track him down and seducing the ex-girlfriends of his full brother, Domingos. During Brazil's 1968 government crackdown, police confiscate all documents relevant to the half-brother. Ciccio also loses contact with both Domingos and his best friend Thelonious; distraught families suspect the young men have died in police custody. In 2013, Ciccio travels to Germany for one last try at locating his half-brother. The narrative's liveliest moments have nothing to do with the search: teenagers Ciccio and Thelonious stealing a car; adult Ciccio imagining great authors attending his father's funeral; an unliterary policeman named Jorge Borges rifling through Ciccio's father's library. Buarque's novel about freedom and repression in Germany and Brazil is both funny and disturbing.
