"Brazil"
By John Updike
Presented By Marie Arana

John Updike's Brazil is a near-mythical story of a man and a woman struggling to love across every conceivable human divide. It is also an impressive Baedeker of a complex nation fused by its myriad races and forged by a violent history. But the reason why Brazil is this month's selection of The Washington Post Book Club is that it is a rare example of a literary leap into an alien culture, a novel in which a writer leaves all tradition behind to pierce through to another world entirely—to an unfamiliar land with another past, another geography, other legends and contemporary characters unlike any he has created before.

Sure, there are novelists who employ simpatico cicerones to plunge us into exotic lands: E.M. Forster in Passage to India, or Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Or we can name those who, having adopted new lands, write about them with the insight of clear-eyed observers: Kazuo Ishiguro in Remains of the Day, or Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita. We can name novelists who ride into foreign territory on the backs of the familiar: by writing about historical figures, as Norman Mailer did in Ancient Evenings, or as Jane Smiley did in The Greenlanders. But there are few, very few, who dare to tell a story set in a foreign place, with that place's people exclusively, and with no intermediary to help us negotiate the terrain.

Brazil is a love story, however, and as such it is terrain we recognize. At its heart is the dilemma of two lovestruck human beings battling an impossible match. When Trista~o and Isabel meet, a mere boy and girl on Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach, they are polar opposites: he, poor, black, a petty criminal with a whore for a mother; she, rich, white, pampered, a schoolgirl with a powerful father. By novel's end, the story has spanned 22 years and the two have tramped through all Brazil—a black Candide with his alabaster Cunegonde—fleeing her father's rage from city to city, stumbling through hinterlands, pushing westward, plowing the jungle, mining gold, outwitting tyrants, retaining shamans, birthing children, leaving it all in their wake. "Throughout," as Michael Dirda wrote in these pages seven years ago, "Updike maintains a tone of antique elegance, his diction rather more elevated, aphoristic and courtly than ordinary English. One might almost think he was hoping that the novel sounded as though it had been translated, brilliantly, from the Portuguese."

As you read this altogether enchanting yet deeply unsettling novel, you may want to think about the following:
--how John Updike, a quintessential New Englander, more often a chronicler of human relationships in these United States (remember Rabbit, Run or Rabbit Redux or Licks of Love?), is able to recreate the flora and fauna of Brazil with Technicolor vividness.
--how the story cuts deeper as it goes. At first, it seems a banal, almost clichéd tale of sensual love, but eventually we understand that these characters—though they are parted countless times—have become halves of an integral whole, incapable of surviving without "the other." "Romanticism is what brings a couple together," says Updike mid-novel, "but realism is what sees them through." What does he mean?
--how Updike riffs on the genders. Is he making a larger point?
--how much of the country and its society he traverses: As Dirda pointed out in his review, "Isabel assumes all the roles of Brazilian woman—virgin, lover, wife, mother, prostitute, concubine, society matron—and Trista~o takes up the principal occupations of Brazilian men—thief, factory worker, miner, farmer, and several unexpected others." We meet black and white, rich and poor, Indians and Asians, Jews and Turcos, the "wild" and the "civilized," the meek and the strong.
--Updike's laser-sharp abilities. Note them, for instance, even in the throwaway lines. As when Isabel's uncle says: "Women and men occupy two different realms — their mating is like the moment when a bird seizes a fish."

John Updike will join Michael Dirda and me in a discussion of Brazil and his other novels on Thursday, June 14, at the Renaissance Hotel, 999 9th St. N.W., at 6:30 p.m. A book signing will follow. Please call 202-448-2406 for reservations. Also, be sure to log on to my online discussion of this book at www.washingtonpost.com/bookclub on Monday, June 25, at 2 p.m.

Marie Arana is editor of Book World.