DEATH OF THE SOCCER GOD, fact-based fiction about race, love, and soccer

DEATH OF THE SOCCER GOD
DIMITRY ELIAS LÉGER
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A global soccer star’s epic ride to the 1950 World Cup places him in shooting distance of his dreams and his own death.

Gilbert Chevalier is a lover of life in a close and constant flirtation with death. His charms and big ambitions flood him with the sense that the world is, in fact, his. Despite his immense talents on the soccer field, his father makes him swear off the sport, a game he sees as unbecoming of a refined Haitian gentleman with a bright future ahead of him in the business sector. Gil promptly breaks this promise when he leaves the bourgeois comforts of Port-au-Prince high society and moves to the vibrant, jazz-soaked streets of Harlem to attend college. Scrimmaging in Central Park, he’s spotted by the US National Team’s coach and is recruited to play for the Americans in the 1950 World Cup in Minas Gerais, Brazil. What unravels next is the stuff of myth. Chance exchanges; secret messages smuggled across continents; lovers shuffled, scorned, and reclaimed; and a journey past the veil between our world and the afterlife. From the Caribbean, to the States, to South America and back, Gil’s journey is lush and lurid, and infused with a breathless, breakneck thrill synonymous with the world’s most popular game.

Death of the Soccer God by Dimitry Elias Legér is a roaring Pan American adventure about the unattainability of the dreams that govern our lives. Energized with the high-voltage fervor of a packed stadium, this is a story of fame and fate bursting with the vivid excitement and thrill of watching world-class athletes perform at their very best.

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My Review: I'll give Author Léger many points for really *getting* the novel as a form's best use: novelty. Starting a story with the titular event and working back from there, we-the-readers aren't left without something novel occurring for very long at all. The factual 1950 1–0 US men's soccer victory over England, whose goal was scored by a Haitian player on the US team (a FIFA investigation determined there was no wrongdoing as all non-citizens on the US team had declared they sought citizenship though only one ever got it), has been immortalized on film and in a non-fiction book before. Author Léger's novel is the first to treat it in fiction, that a ten-minute internet search turns up anyway. I'd be interested to know if any not-Anglophone attention has ever been paid to this unusual occurrence, so please advise if you have any knowledge of the same.

But fictional Gil's life was not begun in 1950, nor did it end there. Along the way from his homeland and the privileged upbringing he had there, handsome athlete Gil falls for a firebrand who bears his child despite being his boring half-brother's fiancée, marries the daughter of a Nazi war criminal hiding in Haiti, goes to Columbia in New York City where his life-altering selection for US soccer team occurs, bums around Europe trading on his looks and his educated wit for food and lodging; rescues Miles Davis from an enraged lover's murderous intentions; and for some reason ends up in front of one of Papa Doc the dictator's firing squads. He reflects, in extremis, on this awful ending so very soom to come for him: "Given the misery and injustice around us, we cannot be indifferent. Believe me, I tried. But evil won’t let you be blissfully ignorant. Or be blissful, period. Evil means hating another person’s peace. Trust me on that one."

Gil is a great, entertaining guide through the world of 1950. He's privileged, but broke; he's mixed race but accepted into segregated high society; he's a reprobate with the self-knowledge to outrun its worst consequences. Until his luck runs out. We aren't vouchsafed the reason that happens. I suspect the cuckolded half-brother had some hand in it, but that's all my own headcanon.

We're addressed directly by Gil throughout the story. It's the reason we get gems like these: "You hate my arrogance, right? I’m among the most arrogant people you ever created. All professional athletes and artists are. Don’t you see how stubborn we have to be to make our dreams and talents come true?" and "All relationships come with asterisks. Life is an asterisk, I would soon learn." Learn he does; not much time alloted to applying his knowledge: "Even today, this dreaded day, Gil remembers with freshly boiled rage all those decisions that weren’t his, but were necessary for the family."

It's a fast-paced two hundred fortyish pages. It's never slack or slow. It's got a lot to say and it says it clearly. Well, mostly clearly, because this twenty-first century guy's eyes look at Gil's unremarked and unremarkable for the time dismissive misogyny and thinks, "well aren't *you* a caddish laddish cheater?" unlike the other people around him. Self-awareness fails us all at some point.

Knowing Joe Gaetjens, the model for Gil in this novel, met his exact end, made this fiction feel very immediate. I was fully in Gil's corner, rooting for him to get what he wanted throughout the story. I glossed over or justified his caddish treatment of the women in his life. It's a weird thing to watch one's self do, while feeling surprised displeasure at the very behavior I'd condemn in another character or real person. That's how I know Author Léger's made a fine work of art. I sought ways to excuse bad behavior and explain away what I could not excuse.

I will note with wistfulness the fact that this is among the very last books that will appear under the MCD x FSG imprint. I have had a good amount of happy reading time with the books from MCD x FSG that I've read. It was a great run, so farewell great kings of biblioholics' hearts.

THERE'S NO POINT IN DYING, words that (now) chill me

THERE'S NO POINT IN DYING
FRANCISCO MACIEL (tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this kaleidoscopic novel set in a favela of Rio de Janeiro—“in the city of stray bullets, in the land of lost opportunities”—a gang member runs wildly through the streets not knowing he has only seven minutes left to live. Barflies, prostitutes, immigrants, a gay couple, a taxi driver, cops, a mobster, and more populate Francisco Maciel’s first book to appear in English.

Leaping back and forth across time and spiraling into the surreal, the novel coalesces around a brutal massacre. Maciel’s multiracial characters write poetry and discourse on soccer, insects, samba, and climate change.

Gritty, unpredictable, and percussive, There’s No Point in Dying is translated by National Book Award winner Bruna Dantas Lobato.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: So once Dafé dies in the first pages of this raucous story-braid, we meet Guile Xangô (a philosophe who's out of place among the pimps and criminals in the favela, and his condescending companion in curmudgeonry and friend Vovô do Crime, as they bounce among times and between people in their geographic orbit. They leave contrails of wry judgment and mean-spirited character assassination. They're flâneurs of the favela, wandering hither thither and yon, taking it all in, standing apart from it, never more than ankle-deep in the roiling waters of undeclared wars, pitched battles between different kinds of criminal gangs.

It sounds violent because it is, because life at street level always is unless you're standing on mountains of privilege. Vovô and Guile aren't, yet they're held apart by the general consensus on the street that they're different, apart by nature, not targets...it's their role to bear witness. Like all us outsiders, weirdos, marginal people.

The ghost stories, animal fables, violent assaults avenged, and socially frowned on intimacies snatched in the chaos of Life, aren't strung on a novel's plot. They're fragments of reality, shards of fracturing order. They're not in linear, but emotional, order. The tone of these pieces of story is consistently manic. A lot happens, just like in life.

It's quite fun if you're in the right frame of mind. The world, the sensory world, is evoked well. It's sights and sounds don't obtrude, they weave in and out of the foreground to good effect. The reason I'm not offering a fifth star on this one is that it's less a narrative than vignettes; it's not a flaw, it's a design decision, and it carries costs with its benefits. The author is able to set a tremendously propulsive pace, at the expense of the emotional investment in the characters. This is not to say they're mere labels moving through a complicated storyboard like something from the Marvel Comics Universe. It's not a narrative to linger, though.

It's a terrific tale of fracturing lives in tension and under pressure. If you're after that sensation of "wow! what happened then?" without lingering on the consequences, this is your read.

A MINOR CHORUS, chorus yes but not a minor one & HUGS AND CUDDLES, the most amusingly inapt title of 2022

A MINOR CHORUS
BILLY-RAY BELCOURT
W.W. Norton
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

ONE OF NBC'S BEST LGBTQ BOOKS OF 2022!

The Publisher Says: A debut novel from a rising literary star that brings the modern queer and Indigenous experience into sharp relief.

In the stark expanse of Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel, informed by a series of poignant encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted man from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Woven throughout these conversations are memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jack’s life parallels the narrator’s own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds. A Minor Chorus introduces a dazzling new literary voice whose vision and fearlessness shine much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.

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My Review: When one reads the book description, there's very little doubt that most of us will be reading this as autofiction...as Billy-Ray Belcourt using the antique roman à clef to give us the keys to the kingdom. But that's never said anywhere. It's not part of the interviews I've read or listened to. I think, in fact, that's a quiet and much-thought-over means of demonstrating how identities are forced on us. Are forced by us, the readers of a novel, onto the author of the novel.

Indigeniety is an indignity of an identity. "Indigenous" is a label of Otherness, much as is "Queer" or "Gay" or "Two-Spirit." Labels are the source of stories, though, and the world's words were invented to make stories so us gossipy apes could make Othering a thing. Assigned by others, Othering is a burden many of us bear and many of us bear multiple ways. We aren't, as it unfolds, allowed much in the way of access to the main character's self-ness; he's collecting data, having copious amounts of sex, and eliciting intimacy from people still carrying horrible scars from being abandoned as children, being addicted to substances, being belittled and having their characters besmirched for queerness or Indigeniety. Or both. No one in this mill-race of ideas and images is in sharp focus. It's that fact that ate a star off my rating...if I have only misty-edged portraits to look at instead of vibrant, violent even, alive people, I respond without the visceral burst of passion I seek in novel-reading as I read their stories.

Author Belcourt being a tyro novelist, and his profession being a poet, this is completely understandable as a technique. It felt chosen, selected for its effect, not as though he simply didn't know how to do any different. That's why that fourth star is still there. I'm forgiving of first-novel mistakes or overreaches but I note them and grade my responses accordingly. I did not get that "oops" sensation from these memory-speaking characters, despite the fact that I wanted to know more about them. More was not to be offered. That is, as I realized, part of the point: What the reader wants is what the colonial master wants, more! more! always more! where Author Belcourt isn't offering it.

There is, then, a subtlety of reflection in this examination of the gulfs between striving and surviving; between surviving and thriving. The novel's structure and style are offers of mirror time. See what this world's demands cost? The price that some must pay while most will never even realize it's exacted on their behalf?

It's a delight of a read. It speaks its truth honestly and makes its voice honey-sweet.

But it is here to tear the tape off your eyes and yank the sock from your mouth.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

HUGS AND CUDDLES
JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL (tr. Edgar Garbelotto)
Two Lines Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: After abandoning his traditional life in a deteriorating Porto Alegre, the narrator of Hugs and Cuddles zealously recommits himself to a man he calls “the engineer”, a childhood friend with whom he shared a pivotal sexual encounter. Many years have passed since their prepubescent wrestling; everywhere around them is a nation in decline. Representatives of the Brazilian state—everyone from government officials to the impoverished—endlessly harass passers-by for donations to “the cause,” even as a mysterious plague rages. Never mind that. Our insatiable narrator, driven to discover his true self through increasingly transgressive sexual urges, is on an epic journey through the shadows of this dysfunctional yet polite society.

The resulting novel is the late João Gilberto Noll’s most radical statement: A Book of Revelations-grade voyage to the end of gender and the outermost reaches of sexual and artistic expression. Nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, Hugs and Cuddles is an unapologetically explicit fable of fluidity that takes readers from decaying city centers to the dark corridors of a mysterious submarine to a miserable hovel in the rainforest, where, at long last, our narrator finds peace.

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My Review: Remember when I reviewed Quiet Creature on the Corner back in 2016? It's the very first Noll story to appear in English. It contained non-consensual heterosex, and it gave me a definite dirty-old-man vibe. That is to say, the book's for a dirty old man not that I'm one!

Buckle up for this tale, ye of little sexcapade tolerance.

There is nothing for it but to say it: Noll's got the one-handed reader squarely in his sights from giddy-up to whoa. If you can think of a way to think about sex, it's in this book. I'm not at that stage of life anymore, but let me tell you it's a heavy breather's dream book.

There is a salad dressing of family secrets, of loyalty given but not reciprocated, reciprocated but betrayed, of gender identities as traps and prisons and comforting hiding places...it's a story that never settles into one groove. There are half a dozen grooves. They each matter, and in the end, each contains a clue to the preoccupations of Author Noll's writing: Honesty and clarity are only so useful in this life but a well-crafted line of bullshit can guide, sustain, and reward you.

The style of the book should be no issue to those who read Milkman or Poguemahone. It's a long, divagating paragraph of startling complexity. Yet the burden of the lyric is simple, that being centered on sex as activity is only fun if you play with sex as biology defines it. The way in and the way out of a soul is the same as it is for a body.

If the roman-fleuve formal technique were somehow packed tight into this book's sausage-casing of 240 pages, it would resemble the scope and the effect of the paragraph as we move from a submarine to a rural shack, from the kind of sex that lives in your memory to the kind you'd pay money to forget. There's not one page not steeped in sex, whether actual sexual activity or contemplating it.

All of which, most curiously, is the opposite of erotically thrilling to me. I quickly discounted the erotic tone of the writer's discussion of personhood, belonging, and power dynamics. It became for me a kind of background, a soundtrack...the sounds!...and thus led me to the sad, wistful realization that Author Noll was always questing, Quixote-like, for the one greatest possible reward of sex: Connection. Giving your sexual energy to someone in return for their emotional vulnerability isn't routinely rewarded. It felt to me that, through this entire read, I was hearing a longing tone and a sad wistful sigh as another orgasm rocked the narrator.

It is, in the end, a sad acknowledgment of the "eternal hell of libido" as the organzing principle of a life. Fascinating, strong meat yet savory in its easy-goes-down tartare preparation. Definitely a worthy addition to your shelf.

THE BESIEGED CITY, third novel by Brazilian superstar woman author Clarice Lispector

THE BESIEGED CITY
CLARICE LISPECTOR (tr. Johnny Lorenz)
New Directions
$23.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s third novel—the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals—is in English at last. Lucrécia Neves is ready to marry. Her suitors—soldierly Felipe, pensive Perseu, dependable Mateus—are attracted to her tawdry not-quite-beauty, which is of a piece with Sao Geraldo, the rough-and-ready township she inhabits. Civilization is on its way to this place, where wild horses still roam.

As Lucrécia is tamed by marriage, Sao Geraldo gradually expels its horses; and as the town strives for the highest attainment it can conceive—a viaduct—it takes on the progressively more metropolitan manners that Lucrécia, with her vulgar ambitions, desires too. Yet it is precisely through this woman’s superficiality—her identification with the porcelain knickknacks in her mother’s parlor—that Clarice Lispector creates a profound and enigmatic meditation on “the mystery of the thing.”

Written in Europe shortly after Clarice Lispector’s own marriage, The Besieged City is a proving ground for the intricate language and the radical ideas that characterize one of her century’s greatest writers—and an ironic ode to the magnetism of the material.

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My Review: Lucrécia Neves of São Geraldo belongs to a place as only a woman who exists in Clarice Lispector's bitter, resentful, passionate novels can. Her town exists, barely, as we learn of her early life in it. During the course of her narration, we learn that São Geraldo is a place in the throes of explosive, exponential growth. This novel's bitterness is directed at the sights of Life, of Nature, being subsumed and defiled by Human actions, for Human aesthetics:

Behold the flower—showing its thick stem, the round corolla: the flower was showing off. But atop the stem it too was untouchable. When it started to wilt, you could look at it directly but by then it would be too late...

The author's organizing principle in this visually driven narrative seems to me to be the manner in which Man, used in the sense of "all humanity" but (*I* think) really aimed at human males, rapes the entire natural universe to get what he needs to be in control. Only then will he be comfortable, on the way to being contented. And I chose that pronoun consciously and exclusively, as I am of the opinion Author Lispector did as well.

It's true that Clarice Lispector, born in Ukraine in 1920 but raised from infancy forward in Recife, Brazil, spoke and thought in a highly gendered language, Portuguese. It's also true that her Jewish family was part of the long patriarchal march of the religion. Clarice was intellectually gifted, gaining admission to the best schools in Pernambuco State, and later into the law school of the national university...I think it's pretty safe to assume she was formatively aware of how little women matter to the men who make the laws and set the course. I see no evidence in anything I've read by or about Author Lispector to suggest she was anything but keenly sensitive to women's absence from the discourses that directly impacted them all her life.

The struggle to reach reality—that’s the main objective of this creature who tries, in every way, to cling to whatever exists by means of a total vision of things. I meant to make clear too the way vision—the way of seeing, the viewpoint—alters reality, constructing it. A house is not only constructed with stones, cement etc. A man’s way of looking constructs it too.

I could be reading into these words what she did not put there herself that "man's way" spoken with an authorial sniff of annoyed disdain. But, reading this least-loved of her novels, I am struck by her absolutely fierce anticipation of the ecofeminist ethos. I can't prove it. I readily admit that her life and its mysteries are outside my knowledge base. But it just *feels* like an angry woman's denunciation of the uncontrolled cancer of unrestrained capitalist "development" destroying the natural world.

I will also note that the critics whose reception of the novel were characterized as "lukewarm" were all males and writing in the 1940s. I suspect they responded to Lucrécia's rejection of two perfectly adequate suitors, Felipe (who disrespected Lucrécia's hometown quite insultingly) and Perseu (whose world was circumscribed by the few words he could be arsed to speak to her), for what felt to a man of the time like frivolous reasons. Mateus, older and "wiser" than Lucrécia, is her eventual ticket to the Big City. Where, mirabile dictu, she discovers that "{e}very man seemed to promise a woman a bigger city," but the promise carries a grim, undiscussed reality with it: She must give up her sense of place and surrender to the city's vast impersonality. It is not in Lucrécia to want this for herself. Her influence with Mateus leads them back to what was São Geraldo...and there to discover that it is not that place, that its development has created a place that is not the one Lucrécia's memories conjure when she thinks of São Geraldo.

A woman of 26, a Brazilian Jew living in Bern, Switzerland, wrote this novel. No, São Geraldo wasn't the Recife of her childhood, nor was the big city exactly Rio de Janeiro where she came of age and married. But she was a person cut off from Home. The nature of Lucrécia's relationship to her world is visually oriented. She speaks of and in images, shapes, sights and vistas; they evoke secondarily and (it feels to me) tangentially emotional responses in her. This makes sense in the context of Author Lispector's dislike for the Swiss countryside...it does, to be honest, live in my memory as shockingly, even surreally, tidy and manicured. Nothing about the place appealed to her, nor if I'm honest did it appeal to me. Visually spectacular, aesthetically wanting.

Is it, then, any wonder that woman Author Lispector looked at the astonishingly male (built, controlled, made to fit a purpose not the spectacular place it's sited within) world of Bern, of Switzerland, and wrote the story of a rather dull, fairly dim girl recording visually, passively, the consequences of male dominion on her world? Even when, after a dull marriage to Mateus palls, she finally falls in love with a man, it's one without a shred of agency to offer her. He is unavailable and uninterested in making himself so.

The world, then, is a place that acts on Lucrécia, a world made by, of, and for men, and she is reduced to eyes without a face recording recording recording the deeds of others, the way they wreak havoc and call it progress:

Upon the rubble horses would reappear announcing the rebirth of the old reality, their backs without riders. Because thus it had always been. Until a few men would tie them to wagons, once again erecting a city that they wouldn't understand, once again building, with innocent skill, the things. And then once more they'd need a pointing finger to give them their old names.

It's not what you call me, it's what I answer to. Lucrécia, her life a response and a reaction, then becomes only a queen in her imagination. She orders her mental world to suit her vision, her view...circumscribed, as always, be men and their power.

THE HOUR OF THE STAR, last work by Brazilian superstar novelist

THE HOUR OF THE STAR
CLARICE LISPECTOR (tr. Giovanni Pontiero)
New Directions
$17.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be.

Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is billed as Lispector, a Brazilian pyrotechnician of words, writing her last novel. It's about 80pp long, so I am hard pressed to see how it's anything but a novella as defined by length. Its content, the descent and fall of one of life's losers, places it firmly in novella territory as well. Its beauty and grace of language mark it as a poetic novella. But it's not a complex, nuanced, developed story, so not what I'm willing to call a novel. Perhaps, in a weird way, it's a reverse récit, a story all in one person's head; but it isn't the actor, the subject, whose head we're in. The narrative frame is like any other frame, a separation of the viewer from the object viewed. It does make seeing the whole object easier; it also makes becoming invested in the object less possible.

But it's brilliant, and it's beautiful, and it should form a part of your mental furniture. It's fascinating in its presumptive male narrator's chill and malign distance from the heat of life that makes Macabéa, the protagonist, both unfurl and wither seemingly simultaneously.

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting.
–and–
First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself "Who am I?", she would fall flat on her face. For the question "Who am I?" creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete.

The relationships that Macabéa, immigrant to the cold cruel city from the cold cruel countryside, forms are classics of naive toxicity. She's seemingly unable to judge anyone around her...even herself...on any level deeper than the most glistening surface. She's not a bright girl, she's not a pretty girl, and she's got no discernable talent for anything. She's destined to come to a bad end.

She thought she’d incur serious punishment and even risk dying if she took too much pleasure in life. So she protected herself from death by living less, consuming so little of her life that she’d never run out. This savings gave her a little security since you can’t fall farther than the ground. Did she feel she was living for nothing? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Only once did she ask a tragic question: who am I? It frightened her so much that she completely stopped thinking.

But Lispector, the creatrix, pulls the Oz-curtain aside periodically, dropping the rudimentary and nugatory male narrator into the bin when she has something important to say:

Will I be condemned to death for discussing a life that contains, like the lives of all of us, an inviolable secret? I am desperately trying to discover in the girl's existence at least one bright topaz.

Could it be, I wonder at the end of the story, that there is no bright topaz in some lives? That the brightest sparkle in some humans is just the mineral potential of bones waiting for death to free it? Macabéa, "female Maccabee" for those interested in looking for some Biblical enrichment of the tale, makes me think...unwillingly, reluctantly, but honestly...that the answer is Yes.

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS, fifty-five years old and going strong

DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS
JORGE AMADO (tr. Harriet de Onís)
Vintage Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: It surprises no one that the charming but wayward Vadinho dos Guimaraes–a gambler notorious for never winning—dies during Carnival. His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding she finds herself dreaming about her first husband’s amorous attentions; and one evening Vadinho himself appears by her bed, as lusty as ever, to claim his marital rights.

My Review: I've explained on my profile over at LibraryThing that I was in a book circle in RL for many years. I posted our group reading list with my one-line assessments of the books. Most of those books I read long long long before I LT or GoodReads existed, and so I've either never reviewed them or reviewed them for the long-vanished book blog.

Whatthehell, I figured, I should go back and glance over the list of one-liners I put onto them, maybe write some reviews of those oldsters.

So that's what I'm a-gonna do.

BkC1) DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS by Jorge Amado: Adored it! Ghosts get horny, too, and why not?

I stand by the one-liner. It's a wonderful book, so it deserves a real appreciation. A marriage of opposites whose love just...happens:

The whole street took part in the serenade to Flor, Flor leaning against her high window, all ruffles and lace, drenched in moonlight. Down below Vadinho, her gallant knight, with the red rose in his hand, so red it was almost black, the rose of her love.

Flor and Vadinho are as happy as any two opposites can be in a marriage. Their relationship doesn't make sense to any of Flor's stuffy, social-climbing family (really, whose relationship makes sense to the family?), as Vadinho spends and cheats and generally makes a spectacle of himself in dreary 1940s Bahia (provincial Brazilian city, think Baltimore or Philadelphia). Especially the day he drops dead in a Carnival street dance.

Flor grieves for him, but life goes on, and the aforementioned stuffy family won't tolerate a single woman in her prime to be left in peace. So Flor marries Babbitt. Oh dear, I mean Teodoro (which is Brazilian for Babbitt). He's not a lot of fun, but he's thoughtful, and gentle, and considerate of her feelings, and a BIG FAT BORE especially in bed. Flor settles in for a life of having settled. So many people of both genders and all persuasions can relate to this.

"And why don't I have the right to contribute to buying us a house? Or don't you consider me your helpmate in everything? Am I only good to clean up, look after your clothes, cook your meals, and go to bed with you?" Dona Flor was in a temper. "Just a servant and a strumpet."

Then...then...Vadinho's horny ghost shows up! Moral crisis: Is it cheating on your husband to sleep with your dead husband? Is this a serious question? To Flor it is, and to be frank, I was so bought in at that point that I took it seriously too.

He took her as though she were a toy, a toy or a closed rosebud which he brought into bloom each night of pleasure. [She] began to lose her timidity, giving herself over to that lascivious union, growing in response, turning into a heartsome, spirited lover.

I mean! Could you say no to the returned ghost of a lover who could do that to you?! Written in 1966, this novel felt as fresh as yesterday to me when I read it in the 1990s. It is subtle and grotesque and sly and, in the end, it's the way a real person is: Conflicted. Is the story in Flor's mind, a desperately bored woman's attempt to recapture some small sense of joy in life, or is Vadinho real?

I don't exactly know, even yet. But you know what? Don't matter one little speck. I believe Flor. She woould never lie to me.

All this took place; let him who will believe. It took place in Bahia, where these and other acts of magic occur without startling anybody. If anyone has his doubts, let his ask Cardoso e Sa., and he will tell him whether or not it is the truth. He can be found on the planet Mars or on any poor corner of the city.

Amado was that good. Recommended, ESPECIALLY for married people of all persuasions.

BLESSED ISLE, a Hearts-of-Oak era tale of forbidden love

BLESSED ISLE
ALEX BEECROFT
Pronoun Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 1790 British Age of Sail

For Captain Harry Thompson, the command of the prison transport ship HMS Banshee is his opportunity to prove his worth, working-class origins be damned. But his criminal attraction to his upper-crust First Lieutenant, Garnet Littleton, threatens to overturn all he’s ever worked for.

Lust quickly proves to be the least of his problems, however. The deadly combination of typhus, rioting convicts, and a monstrous storm destroys his prospects . . . and shipwrecks him and Garnet on their own private island. After months of solitary paradise, the journey back to civilization—surviving mutineers, exposure, and desertion—is the ultimate test of their feelings for each other.

These two very different men each record their story for an unfathomable future in which the tale of their love—a love punishable by death in their own time—can finally be told. Today, dear reader, it is at last safe for you to hear it all.

My Review: I've been reading Alex Beecroft's books since her debut, Captain's Surrender, came out in 2008. I loved it. I gave it to my then-dating partner, Frank, because as a firefighter and a closeted married man I thought he'd really identify with the plight of Peter Kenyon; he ended up coming out, though not divorcing, and pursuing his career as a professional full-time firefighter instead of a cop volunteering as one. "Life's too short," he told me, "and I can't hide anymore."

Well done, Author Beecroft. Your words inspired a positive life change.

So now I read all Author Beecroft's books because I like them and because I have a great memory associated with her work. This short tale of Paradise Lost and Purgatory Gained is in the Age of Sail, the Hearts of Oak days, and features the same reality that opened Frank's eyes and heart: Hiding your true self for fear of the consequences. Hiding love, impossible as that really is, to protect your livelihood and your loved one's safety. How horribly painful that is for all concerned. How unfair to even the worst of one's associates. No one is unscathed by this level of dishonesty, and Author Beecroft makes that clear, and illuminates the awful consequences to all concerned.

The way the story ends, since this is a romantic work, isn't really in question. There will be the requisite HEA. Maybe that's the strongest calling card for reading romantic fiction: Things work out well, unlike much of "real life." The means by which these two men get their HEA was satisfying in a "nyah-nyah" way. The heat level was, it seems to me, modest, but I am a terrible judge of these things because if it's not out-and-out porn I don't think book-sex is overdone. Usually. It's not overdone here.

And the storytelling format, the journal entry end of epistolary noveling, is a further guarantor that both the HEA and the sex levels will remain clear from the start. Not many people speak openly and honestly about their sexual experiences even in a journal. So, well, some glossing is expected, right?

Garnet loves Harry, Harry loves Garnet, society keeps them apart and the entire time they're complicit in the social order's disapproval of their feelings they hate themselves for being so dishonest. What does it cost a man to leave The System?

It shall not be the least of my regrets that I misjudged you so. I am always doing it. You make play of being charmingly reckless, a rake without responsibility, but I should have known you better than that. I am not worthy of you. Not now, and not then.

Less than it costs to stay.

Hours spent either in solitude or in the company of other men seemed grey and barren. Yet my hours with him were a torment of constant awareness and yearning. Without him in the hammock beside me, hot and restless and fidgeting in his dreams like a big dog, I could not sleep.

This, then, is the gift that Author Beecroft has: Making the pain and the passion of loving outside the edges of Society's limited vision vivid and real to those who don't or can't or won't go there themselves.

But as he continued to work out the details of our onward journey, it did finally occur to me that he was giving up his refuge, his true self, for my sake. He was facing again everything he feared, simply because I wished it.

Another happy Royal Navy Read. Thanks, Alex!