Spilt Milk
An Amazon Best Book of the MonthWinner of both of Brazil's major literary prizes, the Portugal Telecom Award for Literature and the Premio Jabuti for best fiction work"I readSpilt Milkin a single night, awed and deeply moved. How did he do it? Buarque has breathed the story of a whole country into a single, unforgettable man with a soul as big as Brazil. But he's also written one of the saddest love stories, and one of the truest."—Nicole Krauss"Chico Buarque is at the forefront of a new wave of writing that should make you rethink everything you thought you knew about South American literature. When I finished reading his last novel,Budapest, my face ached from smiling at its ingenuity, its audacity, its freshness, its line-by-line effulgence, its irresistible narrative momentum."—Jonathan Franzen“InSpilt Milk[Buarque] confronts the themes that make Brazil squirm, from the stain of slavery to the inferiority complex the country has historically felt when it compares itself to Europe.”—The New York Times“Deft and moving. . . . At its heart is the idea that everything, our very lives, is an illusion, in which we cling most desperately to that which matters least. Class, status, breeding fade away, and we are left with what we least expect. . . . What’s most remarkable about the book, though, is not that it somehow manages to internalize more than 100 years of Brazilian history but, rather, the way it also exists almost outside of history, outside of time.”—Los Angeles Times"Buarque, a pillar of the Latin American New Song movement, gives us a fractured, refractive vision from a character seemingly in the foothills of dementia. . . . We find we are in the hands of a master storyteller. It becomes clear why this novel won major literary prizes when first published in Brazil."—Cleveland Plain Dealer“Buarque is an elder statesman of bossa nova, and a legend for his subversive opposition to Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship. . . we can think ofSpilt Milkas a prose equivalent of a Barnett Newman painting—the irritating outbursts and hallucinations about his crazy daughter end up being the strips that measures, divides, and shapes the sweep of colorful narratives that pours out of Eulálio. . . . Eulálio ends up being an idol, a wraith who, at 150, is not quite dead and not quite living.”—The Daily Beast“Buarque is regarded in Brazil as a vital cultural stalwart, an artist who, since the early ’60s, continues to examine his country and instill large social change . . . In the protagonist of Eulálio Assumpção, the 100-year-old descendant of Portuguese invaders and the beneficiary of colonialism’s vast harvest, Buarque fashions a grudgingly likeable narrator . . . Buarque takes his time withSpilt Milk, a book whose real story sits beautifully obscured by Eulálio’s skipping incoherence. . . .Spilt Milkis a necessary, often painful examination of not just a man’s wounds but also of a country’s complicated past.”—ZYZZYVA“Lovely details and a fine sense of place . . . . Echoing Sebald’sRings of Saturn. . . . [When] Eulálio talks of meeting his wife . . . his desire for her is instant and extraordinary. . . . There’s plenty to like.”—Publishers Weekly"A brilliant comic monologue by a Brazilian novelist, in which a hospitalized centenarian curmudgeon on morphine becomes entangled in his own deception-filled life story."—Shelf Awareness“Musical, charged with sensuality and sparkling with surrealist humor, irresistibly seductive.”—La Vanguardia“A Balzacian saga arranged in best Rio style. In less than 200 pages, it covers more than two hundred years of the history of the Assumpção family, and, through this dynasty of rulers, the history of Brazil.”—Livres Hebdo"Chico Buarque has crossed a chasm with his writing, and arrived at the other side. To the side where one finds work executed with mastery."—José Saramago“Buarque writes like a man with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. Shoulders slumped, a wrinkled linen suit; you join him at the bar to hear his wild story.”—Los Angeles Times