Hotel Brasil

by Frei Betto, Jethro Soutar (Translator)

Overview

The setting for this witty and insightful debut crime novel is a Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, family hotel. Rio is the perfect backdrop with its history of military dictatorship, drug wars, child gangs, and violent policing tactics.

The decapitated body of a hotel resident is found. The eyes have been removed from the head, casually left on the floor of the room. The victim's eerie, frozen Mona Lisa smile seems to indicate that the murderer had been received as a friend.

According to the police, the victim was stabbed in the heart and died before the decapitation. As the investigation continues, with few leads or clues worth pursuing, other hotel clients are found dead; all decapitated, usually with the head found delicately balanced on their knees.

This classical crime novel provides an opportunity for Frei Betto (a Dominican friar, once a political prisoner, a union activist, and then an adviser to President Lula da Silva) to describe Brazilian society, especially those left at its edge, like Rio's favela children, abused, hunted-down, but also addicted to drugs and violent crime.

The book tells the fascinating back stories of the hotel residents, suspects, and eventual victims, such as the maid who dreams of making it in television soaps, and the female pimp who has survived incestuous rape, while being faithful to a suspenseful intrigue that could have been thought up by Ruth Rendell.

Brazil will receive much attention as host of the 2014 Football World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781908524270
Publisher:	Bitter Lemon Press, Ltd
Publication date:	03/18/2014
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	718,316
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Frei Betto: Frei Betto, born 1944, is a Brazilian writer, political activist, liberation theologian and Dominican friar. He was imprisoned for four years in the 1970s by the military dictatorship for smuggling people out of Brazil. In addition to work on eliminating hunger in Brazil, Frei Betto is involved in Brazilian politics. He worked for the government of President Lula da Silva as an advisor on prison policy and child hunger. This is his first novel.

Jethro Soutar: Jethro Soutar, born in Sheffield, lives in London and has recently published two works of non-fiction, 'Ronaldinho: Football's Flamboyant Maestro' and a part biography, part chronicle of a film movement, entitled 'Gael García Bernal and the Latin American New Wave', published in July 2008. Soutar translated Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo for Bitter Lemon Press.

Editorial Reviews

01/13/2014
Set in a dilapidated Rio de Janeiro hotel, Betto’s first novel reads like a satire of an English country house mystery, as interpreted by Pedro Almódovar. When the head of one of the hotel residents, an aging gemstone trader, turns up in a hallway with both eyes removed, the police summon bookish Cândido, who devotes much of his spare time to helping Rio’s orphaned street kids, for interrogation. Other suspects at the hotel include Diamante Negro, a flamboyant, cross-dressing transformista; Madame Larência, a retired prostitute turned pimp; and Rosaura dos Santos, who dreams of becoming a telenovela star. Betto, a liberation theologian and former political prisoner, provides the backstories for each of these characters and more, at times at the expense of narrative pace. Of course, the crime solving matters less than the book’s revealing look at the marginalized underbelly of Brazilian society. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

“A wonderful classic mystery novel written to the best standards of the genre. Between layers of the investigation of an unsolvable crime and a display of suspicious characters, Betto slips in a view of the real Brazil, raw and bleeding.” Le Monde Diplomatique

“A fascinating kaleidoscope of contemporary Brazil.” Le Monde

“A roman noir, but above all a bitter sweet novel, Hotel Brasil plunges the reader into the heart of a Rio that feeds on its people” Metro

From the Publisher

2014-02-04
In Betto's debut thriller, a killer is loose in a Rio de Janeiro residential hotel. "Rooms for single ladies and gentlemen. Family environment," announces the sign Dona Dinó has hung outside the Hotel Brasil. And indeed her guests—political aide Rui Pacheco, aspiring telenovela actress Rosaura dos Santos, journalist Marcelo Braga, retired puta Madame Larência, cross-dressing nightclub singer Diamante Negro—feel like family in their combination of community, reserve and selective dislike. But the family comes under attack when retired salesman Seu Marçal, who still peddles the odd gemstone, is stabbed to death and relieved of first his eyes and then his head. Delegado Olinto Del Bosco, head of the Delagacia da Lapa, can think of no better approach to police work than to arrest hotel caretaker Jorge Maldonado and beat a confession out of him. And retired professor Cândido Oliviera, a hotel resident who's the logical candidate to serve as a more effective detective, is distracted by his long-running concern for the neighborhood's street kids, especially the glue-sniffing 11-year-old Beatriz, and his new professional collaboration with acclaimed anthropologist Mônica Kundali, which would surely blossom into love if only he could beat back his schoolboy shyness. As it is, no one takes the investigation firmly in hand, leaving the "Lapa Decapa" free to move on to other hotel residents, though not before first-timer Betto has provided incisive back stories for each of them. Intertwines absurdly understated violence with a reflective portrait of the city and its types so anthropologically precise that you'll mourn each new victim—and that's a lot of mourning.

Kirkus Reviews