Spilt Milk

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. Eulálio d’Assumpção 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 Eulálio 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, Eulálio 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. Agent: Laurence Laluyaux, Rogers, Coleridge and White, U.K. (Dec.)