Australian writer Peter Robb has once again written a whole, complex, foreign society into our comprehension. This time it is Brazil, its myriad worlds of experience, its cruelly stolid immobility and exhilarating changefulness, its very incoherence, somehow made accessible to our understanding. In 1996 Robb’s Midnight in Sicily was published to international acclaim. He had set himself the task like the one the mythical, doomed Cola Pesce had been commanded to achieve: to dive into the sea of the past; ‘to explore things once half glimpsed and half imagined’; and to discover ‘what was holding up Sicily’. And he succeeded magnificently.
A Death in Brazil: A book of omissions by Peter Robb
Duffy & Snellgrove, $45 hb, 372 pp
ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.
If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.
If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.
Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.