Books in Brief

Brazil, by John Updike (Knopf, 260 pp., $23)

JOHN UPDIKE has abandoned the staid suburbs of New England for the kaleidoscopic colors of Brazil in this contemporary retelling of the Tristan and Isolde myth, making a story that strains credulity and entertains steadily. The black Tristao spies the white Isabel on the Copacabana; he is a young thief living in a shanty with his extended family of illegitimates, she the sultry daughter of a high and rich government official with a desire for the world outside her pampered confines of high-rise apartments and exclusive convent schools. If you know the myth, you can predict how their affair will end; getting there is something else. Spiced with the expected fare of vivid, anatomically correct descriptions of varied sexual acts is a bizarre excursion into South American style magical real ism. Mr. Updike handles the form skillfully, with the deceptively simple voice of fable. Readers may be irked by the obviousness to which they are continually returned by the characters’ names. But this is not a crippling drawback in a book written by a man whose imagination remains fertile and whose prose retains grace and bounce.

About the Author

Tracy Lee Simmons

Tracy Lee Simmons is the author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin.

TB

About the Author

Tom Bethell

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Brazil, by John Updike (Knopf, 260 pp., $23)

JOHN UPDIKE has abandoned the staid suburbs of New England for the kaleidoscopic colors of Brazil in this contemporary retelling of the Tristan and Isolde myth, making a story that strains credulity and entertains steadily. The black Tristao spies the white Isabel on the Copacabana; he is a young thief living in a shanty with his extended family of illegitimates, she the sultry daughter of a high and rich government official with a desire for the world outside her pampered confines of high-rise apartments and exclusive convent schools. If you know the myth, you can predict how their affair will end; getting there is something else. Spiced with the expected fare of vivid, anatomically correct descriptions of varied sexual acts is a bizarre excursion into South American style magical real ism. Mr. Updike handles the form skillfully, with the deceptively simple voice of fable. Readers may be irked by the obviousness to which they are continually returned by the characters’ names. But this is not a crippling drawback in a book written by a man whose imagination remains fertile and whose prose retains grace and bounce.