VAST EMOTIONS AND IMPERFECT THOUGHTS.

An international best-seller by a Brazilian novelist follows the absurd and compelling exploits of a film director who is intrigued by the mystery surrounding his newly attained precious gems and a curious offer to make a new film.

The unnamed narrator of this playful, witty Brazilian bestseller is a movie director on a mission: to find a manuscript of the great Isaac Babel's only novel. The director is grieving over his dead wife in late-1980s Rio when an obese carnival dancer asks him to hold a package for her. Shortly thereafter, and after hearing news of the dancer's murder, the director discovers that this package contains precious gems; at the same time, he receives an offer from a German producer to make a movie out of Babel's story collection Red Cavalry. Not until the director arrives in Germany and befriends his beautiful assigned co-translator does he discover the connections between these lost gems and another kind of lost gem: the masterpiece reputed to have vanished when Babel was shot in one of Stalin's gulags. Fonseca's books (High Art, etc.) are like the movies of Spain's Pedro Almodovar: they take an infectious, comic delight in the solemnity of popular fiction (whether thriller or melodrama, on page or on screen) without exhibiting solemnity themselves. This novel is, also, largely about movies, in particular the comparison between movies and books as modes of representation. The erudite, seductive director survives his misadventures in part by remembering what various movie characters would do in the same fix?but, to his dismay, he dreams in words without images: the book's title refers to an early psychologist's description of dreams like his. In other hands, such conceits might be merely clever or absurd, but Fonseca invests them with matter-of-fact eros and gives his globe-trotting intriguants a fresh, dreamlike reality of their own.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From best-selling novelist and screenwriter Fonseca (Bufo and Spallanzani, 1990, etc.) comes this campy, racy little thriller conjoining murder, smuggled jewels, an unknown novel by Isaac Babel, and a Brazilian filmmaker whos reeling at his wife's recent suicide. The filmmaker, flush with the success of his last film, is a man much in demand: A German producer wants him in Berlin to shoot one of Babel's war stories; his unctuous evangelist brother wants him to polish the promo video that will launch the brothers political career; and his lover wants him back in the sack, even though he still feels guilty about his wife (he started his affair after an accident left her a cripple). Then, when a random act of kindness to a woman later found dead leaves him holding her cache of precious stones, he's wanted by a lot of other even less savory characters. To get away from the noose tightening around him, he goes to Berlin, where the producer tantalizes him with a story of the manuscript of Babel's long-lost only novel--now for sale--having resurfaced in East Berlin. He smuggles the producer's money across the border to make the sale, then smuggles the manuscript back, only to elude his benefactor and return with the novel to Brazil. There, an old Russian Jewish scholar and drunk, a close friend who's been hiding the gems, will translate it. Before he can ascertain whether the text is genuine, however, hes kidnaped and held hostage in the Brazilian interior, to be starved until he reveals where the stones are stashed. Through an unlikely but lively combination of good fortune and good looks, he escapes--to find all things revealed when he finally comes home again. Exotic and fast-paced, but also filled with wit and whimsy: A more charmingly intelligent potboiler would be hard to imagine. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A carnival dancer visits a grieving film director in Rio and leaves a box of precious gems, thus beginning a "literary" mystery, both in style and subject matter. Several days later the dancer is found dead, and the director notices he's being watched by a mysterious man in a raincoat. Added to the windfall of priceless jewels he now possesses, a German film producer contacts him with an offer to make a film based on a story by the director's favorite Russian author. Evading local smugglers, the director flees to Germany and becomes a smuggler himself, returning with a stolen, unpublished Russian novel. Fonseca, a Brazilian novelist and screenwriter whose works have been widely translated (e.g., High Art, LJ 8/86), has created an erudite protagonist with an unusual agenda. The result is a thought-provoking story that will be most at home in academic libraries.?Margaret A. Smith, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, MI
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.