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Phenotypes (Paperback)
Paulo Scott; Translated by Daniel Hahn
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R315
R257
Discovery Miles 2 570
Save R58 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize Federico and
Lourenco are brothers. Their father is black, a famed forensic
pathologist for the police; their mother is white. Federico -
distant, angry, analytical - has light skin, which means he's
always been able to avoid the worst of the racism that Brazilian
culture has to offer. He can 'pass' as white, and yet, because of
this, he has devoted his life to racial justice. Lourenco, on the
other hand, is dark-skinned, easy-going, and well-liked in the
brothers' hometown of Porto Alegre - and has become a father
himself. As Federico's fiftieth birthday looms, he joins a
governmental committee in the capital. It is tasked with quelling
the increasingly violent student protests rocking Brazil by
overseeing the design of a software program that will adjudicate
the degree to which each university applicant is sufficiently black
to warrant admittance under new affirmative-action quotas. Before
he can come to grips with his feelings about this initiative, not
to mention a budding romance with one of his committee colleagues,
Federico is called home: his niece has just been arrested at a
protest carrying a concealed gun. And not just any gun. A stolen
police service revolver that Federico and Lourenco hid for a friend
decades before. A gun used in a killing. Paulo Scott here probes
the old wounds of race in Brazil, and in particular the loss of a
black identity independent from the history of slavery. Exploratory
rather than didactic, a story of crime, street-life and regret as
much as a satirical novel of ideas, Phenotypes is a seething
masterpiece of rage and reconciliation.
Driving home, law student Paulo passes a figure at the side of the
road. The indigenous girl stands in the heavy rain, as if waiting
for something. Paulo gives her a lift to her family's roadside
camp. With sudden shifts in the characters' lives, this novel takes
in the whole story: telling of love, loss and family, it spans the
worlds of Sao Paulo's rich kids and dispossessed Guarani Indians
along Brazil's highways. One man escapes into an immigrant
squatter's life in London, while another's performance activism
leads to unexpected fame on Youtube. Written from the gut, it is a
raw and passionate classic in the making, about our need for a
home.
The history of walls - as a way to keep people in or out - is also
the history of people managing to get around, over and under them.
From the Berlin Wall and the Mexico-US border, to the barbed wire
fences of Bangladesh's refugee camps, the short stories in this
anthology explore the barriers that have sought to divide
communities and nations, and their traumatic effects on people's
lives and histories. At a time when more walls are being built than
are being brought down, All Walls Collapse brings together writing
from across national, ethnic and linguistic borders, challenging
the political impulse to separate and segregate, and celebrating
the role of literature in traversing division.
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