The Discovery of America by the Turks

August 1, 2012
Calling it a Brazilian picaresque, per Nobel laureate Jose Saramago's foreword, gives this slim volume far more merit than can be found in its pages. The lighthearted, lusty story by acclaimed Brazilian author Amado (19122001), published in his native Portuguese in 1991 and receiving its first English translation by Rabassa, centers on the dreary and unlikely friendship of two Arab immigrants (Turks to Amado and his countrymen of 1903), one laconic and dissipated, the other youthful and entrepreneurial, in a frontier region of Brazil known for its booming cacao plantations. Our heroes' adventures consist of much drinking, carousing, whoring, and, eventually, a sleepy attempt by the elder Turk to marry off his younger friend to an ugly, shrewish native girl who has come into an inheritance. Amado's vividly comic characters and his light ironic touch are weighed down by vulgarity and misogyny. As Amado explains in his preface, the book is an amusing idea he discarded when writing his novel Showdown (1984). Given Amado's stature and past achievements, he should have trusted his initial judgment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)