The Pilgrimage - Paulo Coelho

OK, I've only read this book because I intend to walk the Camino de Santiago this summer, and I felt like I needed to read the book that made it ever so popular among many (already outdated) new age Italian readers in the 1990s. 

I was expecting it to be bad, but damn, not this bad!

In my mind, it would offer at least some sort of inspiration (and valuable information) for someone wanting to walk the Camino, but I found more useful information in random blog posts by improbable pilgrims. 

And the search for spirituality really grows old and uninspiring from the book's jacket onwards. 

If anything, this book could have put me off from my summer walking plans, but hey, tickets are booked already...

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...).

Dona Flor and her Two Husbands – Jorge Amado

Probably the book that, more than any other, has made me reconsider my relation with magical realism. I read this after coming back from our honeymoon in Brazil, and my huge expectations were simply not met.  For the first hundred pages or so, the descriptions of the surreal daily life in the Pelourinho (Salvador’s historic centre) are funny and entertaining – but after more than four hundred pages this definitely grows old.

Vadinho is an interesting character, probably more so than the titular Dona Flor, but that’s simply not enough to carry a book of this size, and even his phantasmagorical apparitions become stale quite quickly. And it’s such a shame that I can’t appreciate the author of the books that were the first gift from my dad to my mom (and also, according to the former, the main reason why she agreed to go out with him in the first place).