Travel: In the early 1960s, America thrilled to a new dance beat from Brazil. The Girl from Ipanema, with its languid jazz tones, became a bossa nova anthem and a staple of cocktail lounges, writes Ian Thompson.
Written by the Brazilian composer Carlos Antonio Jobim, the song has a hushed intensity of emotion and is suffused with saudade, "yearning" or "nostalgia". This Portuguese word, pretty well untranslatable, is used to describe all aspects of Brazilian culture from painting to literature to music. In this excellent new book on the steamy continent, A Death in Brazil, Peter Robb celebrates the literature, art, food and music of an entire people. The literary travelogue - with elements of history, anthropology, personal experience and quest - is a difficult genre. (In the absence of conventional plot, the challenge is to create a forward momentum, something that Bruce Chatwin was notably skilled at doing.) Yet Robb does it superbly.
In mesmeric detail, he chronicles Brazil's bewildering mishmash of black slave customs and Portuguese colonial proprieties. From Rio in the south-east (famed for its tropical Ipanema beach) to Bahia in the north, the author sees Brazilian culture as a unique synthesis of indigenous Indian, European and African elements. Yet bossa nova, with its gentle samba rhythms, was hardly the language with which to respond to Brazil's military dictatorship which seized power in 1964. Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet who lived in Brazil between 1952 and 1970, praised the regime and its support of the US. Nevertheless it murdered hundreds and brought a steadily worse corruption to Brazil. In his previous work, Midnight in Sicily, Robb wrote grippingly about the Sicilian mafia, and with this sequel he is back on familiar ground.
Much contemporary Brazilian culture grew out of ideas propagated by Rio's avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. In a now famous little book of 1928, Manifesto antropófago (oddly not mentioned here), Brazil's leading modernist poet, Oswald de Andrade, provocatively defined Brazilian music and painting as anthropophagic, or cannibalistic, "eating" other forms of European and African art. Just as the composer Jobim had poached from Debussy and West Coast jazz to forge bossa nova, so the great 19th-century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis ransacked Hardy and Laurence Sterne for his sagas of bourgeois life in Rio.
In a brilliant chapter, Robb argues that Machado is the herald of Brazilian soap operas, or telenovelas, whose subjects are those of forbidden love, betrayal and (always) family feuds. Brazil's main channel, TV Globo, screens immensely long soaps with wealthy, gorgeous actors, all of them nipped and tucked by plastic surgeons. Brazilians are devoted to face lifts, and every year some 400,000 operations are performed across the land - the highest rate per capita in the world. Only the wealthy can afford them, of course, and Robb documents Brazil's horrific social inequalities. The gap between rich and poor in Brazil is more than six times the difference in other "underdeveloped" countries such as India, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia. In the nation's depressed favelas (slums), there is grievous political tribalism and random murder. The recent Brazilian film, City of God, was shot in the hillside slums of Rio, and gave a memorably brutal picture of gun culture and drug trafficking.
Robb praises the film, rightly in my opinion, for its violent "visual flair".
From design to music, through food and film, Brazil appears to be the Next Big Thing, and A Death in Brazil rides the fashionable moment. Robb, an Australian, turns out to be a superlative food writer, and his pages ooze with painterly appreciations of meat stews, crayfish and other dishes.
Meat is in fact a religion in Brazil, and its churches are churrascarias, or barbecue restaurants. One local dish, made out of goat's stomach, sends Robb into raptures. "I have rarely tasted anything more delicious", he enthuses over this Latin version of haggis.
Though parts of A Death in Brazil stagnate a little (there is rather too much on political corruption), overall this is a marvellously engaging amalgam of (often tetchy) opinion, history and flavoursome travelogue, and I eagerly anticipate Robb's next work.
Ian Thomson's Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti is now re-issued with a new preface by J.G. Ballard