The Secret Dinner

The Secret Dinner by Raphael Montes, translated by Zoe Perry, 352 pages 

Four friends find themselves struggling to cover their rent in Copacabana, Rio, Brazil. They are young, broke and really don't want to go back to the rural countryside they fled. A solution presents itself. That solution? Secret "seagull" meat dinner parties. And by seagull, I don't mean seagull. Montes does an excellent job of capturing the protagonists’ desperation and their moral (and immoral) quandary as they try to make it in the big city. 

I enjoyed this book. Parts of it were certainly uncomfortable to visualize, but the characters were well done and I did like the final twist. I will say that I am very glad that I am a vegetarian and do not have to ever worry about being unknowingly fed "seagull" meat. 

My German Brother

My German Brother: a Novel / Chico Buarque, trans. Alison Entrekin, 199 p.

Ciccio comes of age in Sao Paolo in the 1960s, stealing cars with his friend Ariosto and cheerfully stalking his older brother Mimmo's parade of girlfriends.  One day, while leafing through one of his father's books - he has thousands, and they are shelved 2, 3 and 4-deep throughout the house - he comes across a letter pointing to the existence of a half-brother, born in Germany in the early thirties.

I don't know how to say what I mean, exactly, but this novel has that lovely quality of a lot of South American novels I've read: dreamy and smooth, as if the events slide through time kept on a new, strange clock.  It's also very funny, earthy, and poignant.  Based on events from the author's life, and including copies of real letters involved in the search for Chico Buarque's own German brother.