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The Native
(1972)(The Incredible Brazilian)
(The first book in the Incredible Brazilian series)A novel by Zulfikar Ghose
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: Gregorio Peixoto da Silva Xavier.
The second son of a prosperous planter, Gregorio 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, Gregorio has - if not honorably, then with great daring - made, lost, and made again several fortunes. Told with wry and mocking wit, Gregorio's life story is a delightfully outrageous ribald comedy, 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 volume one, the exploration of this raw new land is a counterpoint to the extravagances of its hero. Here, Gregorio and Brazil come together: young, violent, and rapacious, aping the manners of the Old World while pushing forward the frontiers of the New. As Gregorio 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
'Gregorio 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 Gregorio'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, Gregorio ... It is all full of zest and excitement'
The Sunday Times
Genre: Literary Fiction
The second son of a prosperous planter, Gregorio 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, Gregorio has - if not honorably, then with great daring - made, lost, and made again several fortunes. Told with wry and mocking wit, Gregorio's life story is a delightfully outrageous ribald comedy, 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 volume one, the exploration of this raw new land is a counterpoint to the extravagances of its hero. Here, Gregorio and Brazil come together: young, violent, and rapacious, aping the manners of the Old World while pushing forward the frontiers of the New. As Gregorio 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
'Gregorio 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 Gregorio'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, Gregorio ... It is all full of zest and excitement'
The Sunday Times
Genre: Literary Fiction
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