Novel
Um crime delicado
Not translated into English
Sérgio Sant'Anna · 1997
Synopsis
Antônio Martins, a theatre critic in his fifties, notices a beautiful, lame young woman, Inês, in a café in Rio. Shortly afterwards she falls on a metro escalator and he catches her. Fascinated, he discovers that she poses for the painter Vitório Brancatti, with whom he suspects her of having a murky relationship. The book is the account he writes to defend himself against the accusation she has made against him, with a memory full of gaps from alcohol that makes his version uncertain.
Context
The novel appeared in 1997 and was awarded the Jabuti Prize the following year. According to a study in the journal Linguagens, of the regional university of Blumenau, it is made up of three parts, from the meeting to the legal aftermath of the affair, and the narrator presents it as a written play. Its Brazilian publisher sees in it at once a detective plot, a love story of a singular eroticism and a reflection on art and criticism. It was translated into French in 2015.
Who it is for
A novel in limpid language, whose unreliable narrator leaves the reader to judge alone what happened.
Prizes and reception
Best novel of the year 1998 according to the Jabuti jury, it is the only book by its author published in French.
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