Reviews by Caraccioli

Ten years after his last novel (Of Love and Other Demons) Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, returns with Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the story begins when a ninety year old journalist, that went with a woman he didn't pay for, decides to celebrate his anniversary spending a night with a young virgin.
This night turns into a year of a contemplation of the 14-year-old girl sleeping, and the memories of brothel adventures and a boring life of a local paper journalist.
Inspired in Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties, García Márquez builds a novel about a man who chooses lust to prove himself that he is alive and ends up with an unexpected and surprising love story.

A man waiting at stoplight is struck blind. This "white blindness" epidemic spreads like a wildfire. Isolated, in quarantine, or lost around the city, the blind must face the most primitive of human nature: the struggle to survive at any price. José Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, builds a parable about the human being, that holds the most sublime and miserable in every one of us.
Saramago draws a dreadful picture of our society: the sectarianism, the violence, the cynicism of the politicians and the egoism. We can even identify some historical and literary references: the Nazi concentration camps, The Plague by Albert Camus, the modern city before a catastrophe, the strange figures of Bosh and Dürer, the Biblical vision of the blind leading the blind.

Chico Buarque is the author of some of the best Brazilian songs ever written, and he's becoming also one of the best Brazilian fiction writers.
I liked Turbulence and Benjamin, but in Budapest Chico Buarque takes is writing to another level, this is the best of is books and one of the best of the last years.
Budapest tells the story of José Costa, a ghostwriter that returning from a congress in Istanbul spends a night in Budapest and falls in love with the Hungarian language.
This man will become some sort of linguistic emigrant; José Costa becomes Zsoze Kósta a man divided between Rio de Janeiro and Budapest, between Vanda and Kriska, between Portuguese and Hungarian.