Brazil: A Biography
by Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling, Allen Lane, 761pp, £30
In a now famous book of 1928, Manifesto Antropófago, Brazil’s leading modernist poet, Oswald de Andrade, described Brazilian culture as anthropophagic, or “cannibalistic”, eating other forms of European and African literature and music.
Brazil itself is a land of bewildering mixed bloods and ethnicities: Italian, Spanish, Jewish and aboriginal Tupi-Guarani Indian have all intermarried to form an imponderable blend of South American peoples. Brazil’s very fabric is mestizo, or “mixed”, according to Brazilian academics Schwarcz and Starling, co-authors of this lively history of the country.
