Bøger af Zulfikar Ghose

The time is the 1970s. Brazil is ruled by a military dictatorship; terrorists, intellectuals and students have been arrested, there have been fearful accounts of torture. And Gregório, whose fate has been to be a central participant in this history of Brazil, finds his twentieth-century incarnation the most hazardous of all. The urban guerillas cannot be sure if he is not an informer while the Government suspects him of subtle duplicity. Thus, Gregório finds himself as the outsider whose destiny is to prevent, or at least delay the barbarians, both of the revolution and of the counter-revolution, from taking over. Gregório is now involved in an extraordinary drama that sees him as a powerful symbol of modern man struggling against the political chaos of his time. Some historical events - the military revolution in 1694, the kidnapping of the U.S. Ambassador, terrorist bank robberies - form the background to this novel. But Gregório's story is also a story of personal passion for his mysteriously inscrutable mistress Amália and a passion, too, for the idea of Brazil which is more than the territory of a nation. The two passions sometimes coincide and sometimes draw apart: Gregório can never be sure whether in possessing Amália he has not possessed Brazil and losing her whether he has not seen the dream of a perfect world - that 'Brazil' of his mind - disappear. The witty, rich prose of this novel in which the world is brought alive in a language of sensuous vitality makes this a very compelling book to read. To bring the complicated plot together and at the same time to release a world of ideas in the reader's mind, the author has created a prose of equal complexity which in itself will give a profound pleasure to many readers. Praise for The Incredible Brazilian Trilogy: 'A picaresque prose epic of Brazilian history written by a Pakistani-born British poet who lives in Texas could not fail to be remarkable. The Incredible Brazilian is also genuinely comic, truly wise, and altogether fascinating' Thomas Berger '... a considerable feat of the imagination and novelistic ventriloquism' Paul Theroux

The Beautiful Empire is Brazil and in the second half of the nineteenth century the money is growing on trees - the rubber trees whose precious sap is wanted all over the world. Drawn by rumours of fabulous wealth to be won there, Europeans pour into Amazonia. Hardheaded businessmen and romantic adventurers come to make their fortune in the New World and others are fleeing disgraces in the Old. And with them come their pretty daughters, their ambitious wives and their whores. In the thick of it is Gregório Peixoto da silva Xavier, the Incredible Brazilian. While laughing at the extravagance of Europeans and incensed by their insularity he grows rich as they do, except that only a small fraction of his fortunes comes from rubber. As proprietor of a fleet of luxurious floating brothels, Gregório becomes one of the richest men in Manaos and also the most powerful, for there is no magnate whose secrets are hidden from him. He watches the fabulous city of Manaos, with its marble opera house and its countless mansions, rise from the jungle. He mingles with the Europeans who, intoxicated by their success, wash their feet in champagne and send their laundry to Paris and at last, when the crash comes, he sees them scurrying home bankrupt while the jungle reasserts its savage rule. But Gregório is never just an observer - adventures, amorous and otherwise, are always cropping up. In this incarnation he survives the Paraguayan war through the good offices of the celebrated Mrs Lynch, Irish mistress of the enemy president; on a brief journey into the interior he is taken for a god and involved in a revolution; he meets and marries Claire, the greatest love of all his lives. He narrowly escapes a match with priggish Johanna and carries on a perpetual war with Gloria, the passionate redhead who cannot decide whether to love or hate him. And, almost inadvertently he helps the mysterious Mr Wickham to bring about the downfall of the Brazilian rubber trade. Praise: 'The Beautiful Empire is like some richly coloured collage of velvets, braids and sequins, being pretty, exotic, sad and endlessly exuberant' The Financial Times 'This is an unusually intelligent historical romp ... and effectively evocative' The Daily Telegraph

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 in 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 this first book, 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. Praise for The Incredible Brazilian: The Native: 'A picaresque prose epic of Brazilian history written by a Pakistani-born British poet who lives in Texas could not fail to be remarkable. The Incredible Brazilian is also genuinely comic, truly wise, and altogether fascinating' Thomas Berger 'It's a long long time since art of the novel remembered its origins in Petronius and Rabelais and picaresque Spain, but Mr. Ghose's The Incredible Brazilian is right in the tradition. It is boiling hot and rich in sex and imbroglios and roguery: it is in fact picaresque for a permissive age. Ghose's ability to reincarnate the life of early colonial Brazil is quite astonishing and his hero is a giant creation. This is what fiction is meant to be about: life bigger than life' Anthony Burgess 'Gregório is a survivor, a conquistador without a compass, a traveller who seldom arrives. He is betrothed, swindles, dispossessed, thrown into prison, smeared with oil and sold into slavery ... It is a considerable feat of the imagination and novelistic ventriloquism ... one looks forward to Gregório's further adventures' Paul Theroux, The Times '... a wild and picaresque romance of seventeenth-century Brazil recounted in Baron Munchausen style by a rumbustious adventurer, Gregório ... It is all full of zest and excitement' The Sunday Times

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