Blues for a Lost Childhood: A Novel of Brazil

The nameless narrator of Torres's ( The Land ) novel writes from the depths of an insomniac's drunken stupor. Visited in hallucinations by dead family members, he reconsiders his past and theirs. The failed integration of inhabitants of his poverty-stricken province into the corrupt cities of Brazil; the aimlessness engendered by a dictatorship imposed some 20 years earlier in a 1964 military coup; the political and religious struggles that have swept the narrator's native Brazil--all do battle in the person of his late cousin, Calunga. The great hope of his small town in the dusty northeastern Bahia state, Calunga finds fame as a journalist but follows a rapid downward spiral of despair, alcohol and self-destruction in Sao Paulo and Rio. Superbly translated, Torres succeeds brilliantly in orchestrating the narrator's visions, memories, lullabies, poetry and dialogues with lost relatives into a cohesive whole. (Oct.)