“Graceful and melancholic, enhanced by Zoë Perry’s subtle translation...”

“If Graciliano Ramos describes the old, romantic Brazil of a century ago, Emilio Fraia describes something much more like the country that exists today—the country and people I know... The translation is excellent, by the way.”

“[The] translation impresses for the same reason as the novel itself: like the author, [the translators] are impeccable ventriloquists who have reproduced a voice that could never belong to anyone else, that is unmistakeable and utterly original, and they have also reproduced, equally flawlessly, the many other voices contained within it.”

“Part of the praise here, then, is due to the book’s translators, the creators of this perfectly modulated bit of high-propulsion English prose.”