
Spilt Milk Main Edition
Author(s): Chico Buarque (Author), Allison Entrekin (Translator)
- Publisher: Atlantic Books
- Publication Date: 1 Oct. 2012
- Edition: Main
- Language: English
- Print length: 192 pages
- ISBN-10: 184887488X
- ISBN-13: 9781848874886
Book Description
Centenarian Eulalio Assumpcao has reached the end of his long life. From his modest bed in a Rio public hospital, as his mind falters, he grandly recounts his past to passing nurses, his visiting daughter and the whitewashed ceiling. His eccentric stories are seemingly nothing more than the ramblings of a dying man, yet as he overlaps each confused memory, they begin to coalesce into a brilliant and bitter eulogy for himself and for Brazil.
Charting his own fall from aristocracy, Eulalio’s feverish monologue sprawls across the last century, from his empire-building ancestors to his drug-dealing great-great grandson. He confronts his senator father who squandered the family fortune on women and cocaine, and recalls the imperious mother who he always disappointed; but as he drifts through each shifting episode, he never stops searching for Matilde, the girl with cinnamon skin, who danced her way into his heart and then broke it when she disappeared.
Editorial Reviews
Review
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 Budapest my face ached from smiling at its ingenuity, its audacity, its freshness, its line-by-line effulgence, its irresistible narrative momentum. –Jonathan Franzen
I read Spilt Milk in a single night, awed and deeply moved. 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
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