The Lizard's Smile

Against the backdrop of the Brazilian coast, a disenchanted biologist and various other unusual characters wind up searching together for an explanation for the strange changes in the local flora and fauna. By the author of An Invincible Memory.

Acid satire and magic realism, erotic raunchiness and spiritualism, fantasy and ecological protest are seamlessly melded in Brazilian novelist Ribeiro's sprawling, exotic, loquacious, captivating novel. Ana Clara is bored with her loveless marriage to health minister Angelo Marcos Barreto, a crass, sexist, racist homophobe (who nevertheless has a gay affair). She adopts a literary persona, "Suzanna Fleischman," and under that pseudonym produces reams of erotic musings that lead to a very funny parody of Molly Bloom's famous "Penelope" soliloquy in Ulysses . Ana Clara's affair with tormented, shy Joao Pedroso, a biologist-turned-fishmonger, results in her pregnancy and culminates in a murder. Meanwhile, through a lame witch doctor, Joao stumbles upon a secret genetic engineering project at a local hospital which apparently has produced monstrous hybrids in an attempt to cross humans with chimpanzees. The struggle to unmask and shut down this project pits Dr. Lucio Nemesio, a heartless materialist, against Father Monteirinho, a humanistic priest for whom bioengineering and cruelty to animals are forms of evil. In sensuous, luxuriant prose, beautifully translated, Ribeiro ( An Invincible Memory ) blends sexual, political and social satire in ways that few American writers even attempt.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Brazilian journalist-turned-writer Ribeiro's third novel in English is a fast-paced, nimbly rendered, erotic, and exotic saga of a menage a trois involving a dreary wife, her corrupt cacique husband, and her scientist/fisherman lover, with a startling finale. Set in the same northeastern locale as the works of Ribeiro's well-known compatriot Jorge Amado (War of the Saints, LJ 12/93), the work examines the underpinnings of contemporary Brazilian society. The intentional confusion of novelistic genres-melodrama, mystery, science fiction-coated over with a generous dose of satire and Bahian sorcery, recalls both the experimental technique of his Sergeant Getulio (LJ 1/15/78) and the fictional rechronicling of Brazilian history in An Invincible Memory (LJ 3/1/89). Recommended for sophisticated readers.
Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC, Dublin, Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Everything is wonderful about this book except its cruelly pessimistic ending. It tells the story of a small group of people on an island off the coast of Brazil: a lonely, heavy-drinking man who might have been a biologist but who has failed to follow through on everything in his life and is now a lowly fishmonger; his friend, a Catholic priest exiled to the island after confessing a never-consummated desire for a woman; a cruel and conservative politician undergoing chemotherapy treatment for rectal cancer; and the politician's younger, sexy wife, who is seeking fulfillment outside a marriage that oppresses her. What we have developing here is an old-fashioned love triangle, of course, with the priest looking on. But like Graham Greene, Ribeiro wants to do more. A larger moral dilemma establishes the context for the smaller, private ones. The island is actually a site for genetic experimentation, and some local black women have given birth to creatures that are part human and part monkey. Evolution is being tampered with, but will the educated people of the island respond, or are they too caught up in their own problems? Ribeiro is not Graham Greene: he is funnier, for one thing, writes ferociously steamy sex scenes, and is a more attractive stylist. But, as in Greene, his players are moral agents, staring at a world created by an apparently indifferent creator, and what starts out as a deliciously funny satire ends with life and hope being crushed on every front. This is a marvelous book, gripping and disturbing, and a sure midyear candidate for the Editors' Choice list. Stuart Whitwell