Zana, a beautiful Lebanese immigrant girl living with her
restauranteur father in the Brazilian port of Manaus in the 1930s,
is wooed and won by Halim, an itinerant salesman from the old
country. He is full of determination, charm and poetry. Their
marriage is joyful, carefree and passionate until the arrival of
twins. Then Zana makes an error that sets the twins, Yaqub and
Omar, ferociously apart and begins a series of events that will
ensure that the family's happiness eludes them forever. Told by the
illegitimate son of the family's maid, who is keen but also fearful
to know which one of the twins is his father, this is a story of
the devastating consequences of motherly love, set in a landscape
of rivers and mudflats, of wilderness ports and shanty towns, of
affluence and poverty living side by side. The story becomes one of
place. As the family's story progresses, so Brazil too is changing,
and slowly the elegiac simplicity of the waterside town is moulded
by the forces of a new Brazil with its eye firmly fixed on the
future. Milton Hatoum's tale is vivid and atmospheric. His story is
full of the colours, smells and tastes of this exotic region,
bringing to life a time and place not often encountered in
translation into English. So much of the detail of this country and
its life is unknown to us that the publishers have taken the
unusual step of including a glossary of terms at the end of the
book. Picaresque at times in the manner of early Steinbeck,
claustrophobic and intense at others in its description of the
emotions and the spoken and unspoken currents that run between the
family members, this novel is both lively and reflective,
fast-paced yet sombre and engrossing. (Kirkus UK)
Set in the great Brazilian port of Manaus during the golden decades of the Rubber Boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this is the story of identical twin brothers who battle for the love of their mother. It is also a vivid and surprising portrait of a city built over the confluence of two great rivers in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, and the novel itself is full of eddies, dangerous undertows and shifting surface reflections.
While recounting the fortunes and trials of this Lebanese immigrant family over many decades,
The Brothers also delivers a wealth of sensations to the reader: a city full of smells, of sounds and tastes as well as a dazzling array of sights.
Click here to read the first chapter.
‘Gripping ... a human story told in a world made real by a very good writer’ —A.S. Byatt,
Guardian‘From the start, this novel, a kaleidoscopic work following the lives of a Lebanese family living in the Brazilian port of Manaus in the middle of the 20th century, exerts a curious hold ... this is the sort of book in which people do not hold back. The lives of the family are one thing, but what also grips is Hatoum's evocation of this exotic world. From the markets, with their offal and flies, to the lush foliage, rich colours and myriad smells, this is an unusually sensual book’ —
Daily Telegraph'Brazilian novelist Hatoum creates an archetypal tale of brotherly hate that shakes a family. Twins grow up in a Lebanese family living in the Amazon port of Manaus: Yaqub the quiet engineer, pale as a chameleon on a damp wall; dissolute Omar, with 'the whiff of a jaguar's skin'. One of them is our narrator's father — the illegitimate son of the family's indefatigable maid, he spends the novel watching and wondering who spawned him, sobersides or spendthrift. Loping through the middle decades of the past century, the brothers' enmity becomes epic, Cain and Abel up the Amazon. Hatoum's singularity is to assemble a world of pungent detail — peppery stuffed fish, pulpy fruits — which is blown by melodramatic gusts of rancour. John Gledson's absorbing translation keeps its senses on full alert for a slumping hammock or the aniseed tang of arrack, for public brawling and sweaty sexual rivalry’ —
Guardian
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