Spilt Milk
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The revered Brazilian songwriter and novelist "has breathed the story of a whole country into a single, unforgettable man with a soul as big as Brazil" (Nicole Krauss, author of Forest Dark).
As Eulálio d'Assumpção lies dying in a Brazilian public hospital, his daughter and the attending nurses are treated—whether they like it or not—to his last, rambling monologue. Ribald, hectoring, and occasionally delusional, Eulálio reflects on his past, present, and future—on his privileged, plantation-owning family; his father's philandering with beautiful French whores; his own half-hearted career as a weapons dealer; the eventual decline of the family fortune; and his passionate courtship of the wife who would later abandon him.
Through Eulálio's journey across the twists and turns of his own fragmented memories, Buarque conjures an evocative portrait of a man's life and love, while bringing to life the broad sweep of Brazilian history. At once jubilant and painfully nostalgic, playful and devastatingly urgent, readers of the award-winning Spilt Milk will find themselves "in the hands of a master storyteller" (The Plain Dealer).
"In Spilt Milk [Buarque] confronts the themes that make Brazil squirm, from the stain of slavery to the inferiority complex the country has historically felt when it compares itself to Europe." —The New York Times
"Lovely details and a fine sense of place . . . Echoing Sebald's Rings of Saturn . . . There's plenty to like." —Publishers Weekly
"One of the saddest love stories, and one of the truest." —Nicole Krauss
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lovely details and a fine sense of place are offset by sluggish plotting and underdeveloped characters in this slim novel from Brazilian singer/composer Buarque. Eul lio d'Assump o is from an affluent Brazilian family. Now elderly, ill, and living in a nursing home, his memory is not always reliable. Echoing Sebald's Rings of Saturn, in his bedroom Eul lio recalls his life: the opulent mansion in the Copacabana section of Rio de Janeiro where he grew up; his prominent ancestry; a senator father and fashionable mother who traveled to Europe to buy clothes for every season; and the economic difficulties that have made his current situation nowhere near as grand as his past. In first- and second-person, Eul lio talks of meeting his wife, Matilde, at the memorial service for his father. She was wearing a "garment as rigid as armor... a naked body under it could have danced without being noticed," and his desire for her is instant and extraordinary. The two marry and start a family, but a visiting French engineer tests these nascent bonds. There's plenty to like, though more of a sense of the sweeping grandeur of history, or a more energetic storyteller, would have made it more effective.
