The Incredible Brazilian: A Different World - Paperback

by Zulfikar Ghose (Author)

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

Author Biography

Zulfikar Ghose is internationally known as a critic, poet and novelist. His books include Jets from Orange, Figures of Enchantment and a trilogy, The Incredible Brazilian. His work has received praise from T. S. Eliot, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles and Michael Moorcock, amongst others. Born in 1935 in Sialkot, Pakistan, Ghose emigrated to England in 1952. After graduating from Keele University with a BA in English and Philosophy, he lived in London where he was a cricket correspondent for The Observer and wrote for the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and the Western Daily Press. In 1960, he met the novelist and poet B. S. Johnson, with whom he became close friends, and in the same year he joined The Group - a collection of poets who met at Edward Lucie-Smith's house in Chelsea to discuss their work. These meetings were attended by, amongst others, George MacBeth and Philip Hobsbaum, and occasionally by Ted Hughes. In 1963, Zulfikar Ghose was put forward for the E. C. Gregory Award by the judges T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Henry Moore and Howard Sergeant; but when Eliot fell ill, his place on the committee was taken by a solicitor who raised an objection concerning Ghose's nationality. The committee decided to overcome the legal hurdle by giving him a "Special Award". His works comprise books and poems published on both sides of the Atlantic and where his rich prose has been described as "remarkable, imagistic, witty and original" and all his writing "sheer literary pleasure, exciting, effective, evocative and the beauty of great art". In 1969, Ghose emigrated to the U.S.A after an invitation to teach at the University of Texas at Austin. He had tea with Patricia Nixon at the White House who presented him with a copy of The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. He became a US citizen in 2004 and went on to hold the distinguished position of Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor in Creative Writing. Ghose, now retired from full-time teaching, is the Professor Emeritus, University Texas at Austin. He lives with his wife Helena de la Fontaine, an artist from Brazil, whom he married in London in 1964.