Refinished Mo 4/10/23
This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks that I first completed on Tu 4/18/95 at The Club.
"MAGICAL REALISM"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism
I cannot believe that this is the same author that wrote the Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom series. 'BRAZIL' is a kind of retelling the story of 'Tristan and Iseult 'which is a medieval chivalric romance told in numerous variations since the 12th century. Based on a Celtic legend and possibly other sources, the tale is a tragedy about the illicit love between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Iseult.
A black street kid meets a white girl at the Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It's eternal love at first sight and the couple have trouble because they are from two different classes and two different racial groups, so they flee to the uncivilized interior of the country.
Brazil is a 1994 novel by the American author John Updike. It contains many elements of magical realism. It is a retelling of the ancient tale of Tristan and Isolde, the subject of many works in opera and ballet.
Tristão Raposo, a nineteen-year-old black child of the Rio de Janeiro slums, spies Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, across the hot sands of Copacabana Beach, and presents her with a ring stolen from an American tourist. Their flight into marriage takes them from urban banality to the farthest reaches of Brazil’s wild west, where magic still rules. Privation, violence, captivity and poverty afflict them; his mother curses them, her father strives to separate them, and neither lover is absolutely faithful. Eventually, ancient charms change him to white and her to black. Yet Tristão and Isabel hold on to the belief that each is the other’s fate for life, as they develop in ways they never thought possible.
The novel is compelling reading and the style is descriptive, but I prefer his beautiful work on the Rabbit Series.
I will keep an eye out for 'THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK' and give that novel a shot.
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