It Does Seem Odd, But These Things Happen

It's been a couple months since I read the galleys of Peter Robb's A Death in Brazil, but I'm pretty sure Richard Eder fudges a detail in his description of the opening: "A young burglar sneaks into his Rio de Janeiro apartment." As I recall it, the burglar doesn't have to sneak into the apartment, because he's been flirting with Robb for some time on the bus, all the while suggesting that he's going to rob him and kill him. But Robb lets him into the apartment anyway, which leads to this:

Murders happen anywhere and mine most nearly happened in Rio. Twenty years later only the scar of a small knife wound on my arm reminds me this is a memory and not a dream. The night went on and on like a dream, with a dream's ungraspable logic, or a Brazilian soap's. Details become wonderfully vivid, like the old carving knife with a long curved and darkened blade carelessly left earlier on the kitchen bench of the Copacabana flat, in the moment it was being held at my throat. My Portuguese lost its rudimentary awkwardness and became unreally fluent very fast. Words I never knew that I knew came pouring from my throat. Things flowed with a dream's weightless speed. The danger lay in the speed. A flailing knife blade moves faster than thought. Movement had to be slowed, the heat lowered. It was the one thing I understood. Let nothing happen. Respond to violence, not with violence, speed, and noise, but with ponderous torpidity, envelop each new threat in slowness. The beautiful Portuguese periods began to roll, slowly, slowly, but with what baroque grace, from my amazing tongue. Obtuse fearlessness stayed the hand with the knife, impassive calm put a little wobble in the spin of violence.

But whichever one of us has the shaky memory, Eder and I agree you should read it. He says, "It is the Brazil that Mr. Robb sees beyond the sensations that gives his book its great traveling dimension." I call it "a delightful jumble: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with a Latin beat." And the fact that a substantial portion of the book deals with the first presidential campaign and eventual ascendancy of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who generated controversy recently when he tried to kick out a NYT reporter who filed a story about national concern over his fondness for drink--well, that's just a timely bonus.