Brazil

Summary: Tristão Raposo, a nineteen-year-old black child of the Rio slums, and Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, meet on Copacabana Beach; their flight into marriage takes them to the farthest reaches of Brazil’s wild west. Privation, violence, captivity, and reversals of fortune afflict them; his mother curses them, her father harries them with hirelings, and neither lover is absolutely faithful. Yet Tristão and Isabel hold to the faith that each is the other’s fate for life, as they pass—in Shakespeare’s phrase—“through nature to eternity.” Spanning twenty-two years, from the mid-Sixties to the late Eighties, Brazil surprises and embraces the reader with its celebration of passion, loyalty, and New World innocence.