 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
A Death in Brazil
By Peter Robb
Duffy & Snellgrove $45.00
 Although Sydney-based author Peter Robb is not grouped with the prominent food writers in the upcoming Byron Bay Writers Festival, his dining descriptions are nothing less than exuberant.
The Brazilian 'slave dish' feijoada, he tells us, is a concoction of 'about a dozen kinds of beef and pork, smoked and salt... stews are the great thing in Brazilian cooking - the delicately spiced inland stews of chicken and kid, the vividly African moquecas of the coast, made with anything from the sea, golden with palm oil and soft with coconut milk - but none of them enacts better than a good feijoada the magic that can happen [as Huckleberry Finn put it] in a barrel of odds and ends.'
Such is Brazil at large, a concoction of vibrant, often violent politics, passionate writing and TV soaps, and great social injustice, the whole making it 'the oddest and most thrilling country in the western hemisphere.'
In his opening chapter, Robb observes, 'Murders happen anywhere and mine most nearly happened in Rio,' but the death of the title is that of Paulo Cesar ('PC') de Farias, shot in his bed, along with his glamorous lover, Suzana Marcolinos, who was claimed to have been 'inflamed by whisky and argument'.
PC was a car-dealer turned bagman for Fernando Collor, a three-year president of Brazil later impeached for corruption.
In the early days, before he'd salted away US$1 billion and smuggled more than five tonnes of cocaine, 'PC rode around... in the back seat, holding up the financial pages of the paper, driver and passenger sweating like pigs in the tropical heat. PC kept the windows up to simulate the air conditioning he couldn't yet afford.'
This book is a wonderful account of the rivalry between Collor and the leftist (and current) Brazilian president, Luis ('Lula' - the Squid, because of his ringleted hair) da Silva, who came from the poor northeast interior and reluctantly took on the mantle of people's champion.
'Fernando and Lula seemed to come from different countries, and in a sense they did... Fernando was a winner in a country where Lula and all the people
like him were born to lose.'
As Robb observes, 'the age of Fernando and PC was appalling, but it was unbelievably brief. Things slid backward after that, but in Brazil things always do.'
He subtitles his tale a 'book of omissions', but even what it contains makes for a rich cultural stew.
- Thanks to Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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