A page-turning novel about a Black teen from the Rio slums and an upper-class white girl who are brought together by fate and betrayed by families who threaten to tear them apart—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. “Steamy...breathtaking.”— The New Yorker They meet by chance on Copacabana Beach: Tristao Raposo, a poor black teen surviving day to day on street smarts and the hustle, and Isabel Leme, an upper-class white girl, treated like a pampered slave by her absent though very powerful father. Convinced that fate brought them together, betrayed by their families, Tristao and Isabel flee to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wild west—unaware of the astonishing destiny that awaits them…. 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. "A tour de force … Spectacular." — Time "Updike's novel, as tender as it is erotic, becomes a magnificently wrought love story…. Beautifully written." — Detroit Free Press Allusions to Tristan and Isolde dot Updike's fiction, poetry, and even nonfiction, so it is not surprising to find him reimagining their story as a novel. Surprisingly, he places them in the Brazil of the last three decades. His Tristan is a black beach boy, his Isolde the affluent daughter of a career diplomat; their mutual destiny begins when they meet on a Rio beach. Updike's Brazil, described with his customary scrupulous detail, is alien enough to provide a legendary landscape where the lovers must confront tribulations, endure separations and enslavement, survive deadly adventures, and rely on their love literally as their only sustenance. The rich prose is Updike's characteristic own, but he achieves a tone suggesting that of both the medieval troubadours and the modern Latin American fabulists. Like his earlier novel The Coup ( LJ 10/15/78), Brazil is not really so much a departure for Updike as a confirmation of his versatility. BOMC alternate; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/93. -Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Updike has ventured far afield from Rabbit country before, particularly in The Coup (1978), about the change of administrations in a small African nation. He's gone over the horizon again in his latest novel--and where he's gone is obvious from the title. In a sort of retelling of the Tristan and Isolde legend (the boy and girl are named Tristao and Isabel here), Updike depicts the love affair between a black teenager from the streets of Rio and a privileged young white woman raised in a luxurious apartment high above those mean streets. Updike follows Tristao and Isabel through several years and several trials and tribulations; their separate worlds continue to exert opposite influences upon them. But dipping his hand in magic realism, that by-now famous trait of Latin American literature, Updike reverses the situation--up here in the States, we'd call it an example of deus ex machina on a grand scale--producing a shaman who makes Tristao white and Isabel black. Irony of ironies, as a white man, Tristao is murdered on a Rio beach by a pack of street boys. It's an engaging love story, written in Updike's usual golden-toned style. But what is missing is the earthy heat and beat that so naturally permeate the writing of native Brazilians; Updike's novel has the feel of an outsider looking in. Nevertheless, despite the texture of "research," Brazil is far better than most fiction writers' best efforts and deserves the attention any book by Updike is bound to receive. Brad Hooper The indefatigable Updike only occasionally succeeds here. Tristo, a black teenager from the favela, encounters Isabel, a rich and sheltered young daughter of the elite, one afternoon on Rio's Copacabana beach--and when Isabel takes him home and gives her maidenhead to him, both kids discover a love union like that of their storied counterparts, Romeo and Juliet. With Tristo, Isabel flees Rio, ahead of her father's armed posse, and they make it as far as So Paulo. There, Isabel is wrenched away--but this is only the first of a number of forced (and false) partings, around which, together, Isabel and Tristo will turn to gold-mining, prostitution, living among jungle Indians, and finally re-civilization. Isabel will even resort to the help of magic to have Tristo returned to her, at the price of a shaman-induced change in respective skin-colors for them both--Updike's woolliest turn in a story fanciful with twists and turns, touristy aperus, and sexual philosophy. Like a slab of abused plywood, the novel is forever coming apart into its separate laminates. Updike at times (especially when he's trying to write suspenseful scenes, or violent ones) seems to be using the exotic foreignness of his setting as an excuse for over-vividnes