Brazil: Life, Blood and Soul

Review by Philip Blazdell

I was really looking forward to reading this book and considering the lack of quality travel books written about this wonderful country I felt that this hefty tome would be something to relish.

How wrong I was.

In my opinion Malathronas has produced what has to be one of the most pretentious and annoying travel books ever committed to paper. He has taken a subject which should be hard to write badly about and produced something so valueless and crass that one is almost forced to admire the book. So what is the problem?

Firstly, Malathronas simply isn't a nice person. He is a pretentious, precocious, promiscuous prig whose prurient ideas and stereotypical views range from the mildly offensive to the downright obnoxious – and as for his perfect temper tantrums, such as when his T-shirt gets dirty, you just hope that someone really does mug him and put us all out of our misery. If he would only stop winging about his countless lovers (and I really do mean countless – I think he beds about 30 in the first chapter...), stop seeing everyone as a potential conquest and spend more time getting to know people rather than getting them into the sack than this would be a much better book.

Secondly his narrative lacks any degree of clarity and he swims through time as easily as he changes lovers. At times its hard to know if he is talking about the present or the past and the text jumps around leaving the reader wheeling and confused. Tighter editing would have worked wonders for this book and might actually have produced something, if not enjoyable, but at least readable.

Thirdly, Brazil is, according to the blurb on the back of the book, an eclectic nation that evokes images of vibrant carnivals, crowded shanty towns and football on the beach yet the author fails to capture this dynamic, vibrant atmosphere and instead pumps out all the same clichés (football, bikinis, beaches) without ever really questioning if there is more to Brazil than his shallow perceptions. He never, ever seems to get under the skin of the country (which isn't surprising considering his unhealthy and shockingly excessive obsession with sex).

Fourthly, the author is fond of dropping whole slabs of history into the text. Although this does serve to put some meat on the bones of his story it is done in such a ham-fisted way as to totally break down the narrative and make the book even more leaden than it already is. Again, much tighter editing would have made the narrative flow more smoothly.

Overall, there is little to enjoy in this book. It simply perpetuates the sun-sand-and-sex myth that most people believe to be the modern Brazil and offers no new or exciting insights into this wonderful country. It is, I am afraid to say, terribly disappointing.