A Cidadela Inventada – Pihba Cavalcanti

And for my 150^th post, a book by, erm, my father in law (and with this second one, I promise, I am done with books by family, friends, etc.). Jokes aside, a couple of years ago every bookstore in Brazil had a few copies of the novel, so it actually deserves to be here in its own right.

The book is a clear declaration of love from its author to his city (Recife, in Pernambuco – Brazil) and the amount of research that has gone into its more historic pages is really impressive. All the characters are funny, if a bit goofy, and the reader is naturally drawn to them.

As I predicted, I enjoyed the sections of the novel that deal with the development of the city during the Dutch period much more than the dream-like science-fiction (it’s not a coincidence that one of the author’s favourite books is Calvino’s Cosmicomiche). Also, I read the book in Portuguese, a language I can read only reasonably well and can’t speak at all, so a number of the subtleties of the novel probably escaped me (that said, I discovered some amusing assonances between Portuguese and the Piedmontese dialect – something that I found utterly random...).