The Brazilian paradox

As the great Bossa Nova musician Tom Jobim liked to say, Brazil is not for beginners. This tends to be the case for biographies too: an admiration for the protagonist comes first. But once one has a taste for the flair, language and music of Brazil, the extraordinary tale of the pressure cooker that forged it heaves into view.

Five centuries of pharaonic boldness and brutality meander through this hefty tome. In relating the events that shaped Brazil’s vast and unlikely realm, the authors seek to dispel the ‘fairytale’ myths that continue to distort reality.

Take cachaça, Brazil’s national liquor. The reader may consume it in a genteel setting in a caipirinha cocktail. But learning here about the brutal slavery on the sugar plantations casts it in a less agreeable light. Its alternative name is pinga, from the verb ‘to drip’, and it turns out that this alludes to condensed steam falling upon toiling slaves as liquid sugarcane boiled in the furnaces. The slave traders would then peddle the fiery liquid on the coasts of Africa in exchange for new human cargoes.

From the colonial era to the military dictatorship that still lingers in recent memory, the authors show that dissenters and separatists have encountered brutal repression, as successive rulers have held the centre with an iron fist. Under the generals who ruled from 1964 to 1985, the torture and murder echoed the horrors of the pelourinho, the public pillory of colonial days, where rebellious slaves were savagely whipped. We also see how the dictators’ heavy-handed hubris fuelled debt and inflation, and nourished a confusion between public and private property that continues to plague Brazil’s politics in spectacular fashion today.

Yet despite all the tribulations and the violence, Brazil’s luminous charms shine through, as does its power to enthuse and assimilate newcomers.