Word: surrealness
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WIEGUES NEVER STRAYS from the visceral tingle of the provocative landscape and the physical existences of the characters. The rich, hot colors of Brazil--lush greens, electric blue seas, lurid sunsets--seem charged with surreal power; even the pastels seem energized, and the slums are unfailingly photogenic in their squalor. The enchanting promiscuity of the landscape, the vagabond itinerancy, and the no-sweat amorality of the characters keep the narrative amiably in motion, unburdened by overt lecturing or tedious symbols. The native Cico, who might have been pressed into the boring documentary role of "yokel-from-the-primitive-hinterlands...
Despite its excessive length and occasional splotches of unfortunate writing, Diegues's travelogue faces a world in wildly confused flux and preserves the fare complexity of response demanded by the subject. He handles the contradictions of daily life--the ones that give the movie a surreal ambience in details like, an old Indian woman newly dislocated from her tribal existence listening raptly to the Everly Brothers on her Sony or the appearance of Polices in rustic back country hamlets--with a comic finesses that never excludes serious meaning, yet never preaches it. Diegues remains oddly hopeful as he charts Brazil...
...that silo?" "Let's give it a try, Orville.") Actually, the space shuttle brings to mind a bloated, brick-covered DC-9, except that when "stacked" (as the space people say) on the launch pad with its enormous fuel tank and two crayon-shaped rocket boosters, it forms a surreal ensemble that could easily be passed off as the Intergalactic Hilton in a hokey sci-fi movie...
FICTION. Neighbors by Thomas Berger. A surreal, slapstick comedy about life in exurbia. Joshua Then and Now by Mordecai Richler. The literary life, the shenanigans of the rich and newly rich, the pains of middle age and the importance of family loyalties, by Canada's most engaging novelist. Loon Lake by E.L. Doctorow. The author of Ragtime plays intricate and haunting blues variations on the American dream during the Great Depression. Italian Folktales, selected and retold by Italo Calvino. One of Italy's best novelists takes time out from his own fiction to become the Brothers Grimm...
...Chatwin is no V.S. Naipaul balefully chronicling the political travesties of the Third World. His book is both a luminous historical document and an exploitation of the surreal past. The author's talent for invoking history's black magic is evident in this description of the interior of a rotting Da Silva house: "Dom Francisco's wardrobe, held together by its paint surface alone, lasted until 1957, when it collapsed, revealing a wreckage of whalebone stays and shreds of black taffeta that fluttered upwards like flakes of carbonized paper Bruce Chatwin . . . the pictures were...