Tropical Truth: A Story Of Music And Revolution In Brazil

Title: Tropical Truth: A Story Of Music And Revolution In Brazil
Author: Caetano Veloso
ISBN: 9780747568018
Binding: paper
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Number of Pages: 354
Price: £7.75

From Publishers Weekly

The Brazilian singer/songwriter most highly regarded by the First World intelligentsia, Veloso makes his U.S. publishing debut with a rambling, extremely erudite memoir focusing on his role in the late-1960s musical happening known as Tropic lia. While on the surface, Tropic lia and Veloso (often compared to Bob Dylan) paralleled the U.S. counterculture of the 1960s, the author explains the multilayered context of Brazilian politics and art that made the movement unique. From the innocence of his middle-class youth in the northern state of Bahia, to his stays in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Veloso vividly re-creates his formative years, which were immersed in French new wave cinema, progressive English rock and Brazilian letters, particularly concrete poetry. "What we wanted to do would be... closer to Godard's films," he muses. "Masculin-feminin [sic], with... its adolescent sexuality-I saw it as one more moment in our daily lives in Sao Paulo." That Veloso is well-read is not in question-he cites everyone from Wittgenstein and Proust to Deleuze and Andrew Sullivan, while at the same time introducing non-Brazilian readers to an unknown canon of authors such as poet Augusto de Campos and essayist Oswald de Andrade. If there is any complaint with the book, it is that Veloso can get caught up in a maze of sometimes unconnected ideas that obscure his lucid descriptions of the intricacies of Brazilian music and its often equally literate stars. However, this is a must for Brazilian music fans, as well as anyone interested in how the modernist age played out in South America.

Envy

Title: Envy
Author: Yury Olesha
ISBN: 0-88233-091-8
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Ardis
Number of Pages: 315
Price: $12.95

Translated with an introduction by T.S. Berczynski

First published in 1927, Yury Olesha's Envy is, both stylistically and thematically one of the most provocative novels from the soviet era. Andrei Babichev is a paragon of Soviet values, an innovative and practical man, Director of the Food Industry Trust, a man whose vision encompasses such future advances for mankind as the 35-kopeck sausage and the self-peeling potao. Out of kindness, he rescues from the gutter Nikolai Karalerov, violently tossed from a bar after a drunken and self-destructive tirade. But instead of gratitude, Babichev finds himslf the subject of an endlessly malignant jealousy, as Kavaelrov sees in him a representative of the new bredd of man who has prevented him from realizing his true greatness. A scathing social satire, Envy is a concise and incisive exploration of the paradigmatic conflicts of the early Soviet age: old versus new, imagination versus pragmatism, and the alienation of the romantic artist in the age of technology.

Critics as far apart as Gleb Struve ("One of the most interesting and original works in the whole of Soviet literature") and Pravda ("Olesha's style is masterful, his psychological analysis infinitely subtle, his portrayal of negative characters truly striking") have praised the novel, and one of the signs of its universality is the fact that it has been claimed by nearly every school of critics and interpreted as everything from a submerged homosexual story to a 10th century Noes from the Underground.

A CAPTIVE SPIRIT :Collected Prose by Marina Tsvetaeva

Title:A CAPTIVE SPIRIT : Collected Prose
Author: Marina Tsvetaeva
Introduction by Susan Sontag
Translated and edited by J. Marin King
ISBN: 0-88233-353-4
Binding: Paper
Publisher:Ardis
Number of Pages: 491
Price:$ 16.95

Captive Spirit shows Marina Tsvetaeva's genius at the peak of its power. The selections are from her mature period, the 1930s, and include almost all of her autobiographical writings, her major literary portraits, and her literary criticism.

Exiled in Paris and isolated in the emigre community during this period, Tsvetaeva became increasingly aware of the importance of biography, history, and myth. Her famous portraits of Maximilian Voloshin and Andrei Bely reveal her remarkable capacities as an eyewitness, while her moving accounts of her father and mother, sisters and brother, seen through a child's eyes, comprise the most lyrical of family chronicles. The final section of the book, juxtaposing two works of literary criticism, demostrates her formidable critical and analytical intelligence.

Tsvetaeva composed her prose to be read aloud, and these essays, full of extraordinary vitality, reflect the urgency of one who writes to discover the essential truths hidden in the past. A Captive Spirit is a remarkable collection of work from, as Vladimir Nabokov described her, "a writer of genius."

"The Russianness of Tsvetaeva's poetry and prose-singularly direct and forceful are they are—consists in an obvious authenticity of the emotions. Everything is felt instantly and strongly; everything is strashny and vesely—terrible and joyful—and yet about this directness there is nothing histrionic, sloppy, or self-indulgent." —JOHN BAYLEY, The New York Review of Books