Boa noite, Amazona
Good Night, Amazon
by Manoel Herzog
Alfaguara, 2019
136 pages
15×23 cm
With an agile, sparkling and ironic prose, Manoel Herzog emerges as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Brazilian literature. In Good Night, Amazon, his unique style is combined with an unusual character, reflecting the country’s dichotomies.
The main voice of this Amazonian tale is that of a left-wing economist working for a huge private bank. He’s against abortion and death penalty, but at the same time he would deny minimum labor rights to the janitor of his house and participates in confraternities and sects, especially as a member of Freemasonry. He claims to be a humanist, but loses his mind when a loan borrower cannot repay his debts on time. Now, at the age of 49, he’s in the middle of a terrible crisis, with a divorce and a dead father as its main reasons, not to mention the fact that he always wanted to be a writer but has never been able to produce anything significant. On top of this all, he often wakes up at dawn kicking the sheets, and is diagnosed with Restless Legs Syndrome.
A Spanish witch reads his future in the tarots and tells him that salvation is waiting for him in the forest. Following the cards he decides to start a journey to the heart of the Amazon Forest, where he hopes to get lost – and to find himself again once and for all.
A peculiar novel, digging deep into the absurdities of a man and those of a wonderful and savage country.
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Manoel Herzog was born in Santos, São Paulo, in 1964. Raised in Cubatão, he worked in the chemical industry and graduated in law. He debuted in literature in 1987 with the poems of Brincadeira surrealista. Among other books, he is the author of the novels Os bichos (2012), Companhia Brasileira de Alquimia (2013), O evangelista (2015) and the poetry book The comedy by Alissia Bloom (2014), shortlisted for the Jabuti prize. In 2017, Alfaguara published his novel The jackfruit from the cemetery is sweeter.
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