What if a man were so shallow that he couldn't believe his life had meaning unless he was loved and desired by millions of people?

A modern-day Don Quixote and an exile in his own hometown, the protagonist of Teeth Under the Sun is kept from writing by a conspiracy (real? imagined?) designed to prevent him from revealing the truth about the town's strange status quo and violent past.In a place where people have abandoned their houses for tiny apartments in the confines of new high-rises, the narrator walks the almost empty streets, remembering better times and meeting figures from his past: his ex-wife, his son, writers, friends, and revolutionaries. And all of this is interspersed with his memories of the movies Fact and fiction, past and present, all meet in this story of the narrator's attempts to engage more fully with a modern world forcing him into isolation.

There are no heroes in Igna cio de Loyola Branda o's world, only victims: not only of violence, but of deceit, desire, and fear. In The Good-Bye Angel, Branda o returns to his great subject: the tyranny of the community versus the individual, the city versus its inhabitants. Large enough to develop its own mythology, yet small enough to be provincial and petty, the city of Arealva (standing in for Brazil, and the world at large) is itself a character in Branda o's latest novel, toying with and finally consuming its citizens with the innocent cruelty of a cat with its prey--it's nothing personal, but it needs the meat. A cross between a film noir and a Greek tragedy, with more than its share of sex and drugs (though no rock 'n' roll), The Good-Bye Angel begins with a murder and ends in a panorama of ambition, obsession, libido, hypocrisy, and loneliness.

What if a man were so shallow that he couldn't believe his life had meaning unless he was loved and desired by millions of people?

A modern-day Don Quixote and an exile in his own hometown, the protagonist of Teeth Under the Sun is kept from writing by a conspiracy (real? imagined?) designed to prevent him from revealing the truth about the town's strange status quo and violent past.In a place where people have abandoned their houses for tiny apartments in the confines of new high-rises, the narrator walks the almost empty streets, remembering better times and meeting figures from his past: his ex-wife, his son, writers, friends, and revolutionaries. And all of this is interspersed with his memories of the movies Fact and fiction, past and present, all meet in this story of the narrator's attempts to engage more fully with a modern world forcing him into isolation.

There are no heroes in Igna cio de Loyola Branda o's world, only victims: not only of violence, but of deceit, desire, and fear. In The Good-Bye Angel, Branda o returns to his great subject: the tyranny of the community versus the individual, the city versus its inhabitants. Large enough to develop its own mythology, yet small enough to be provincial and petty, the city of Arealva (standing in for Brazil, and the world at large) is itself a character in Branda o's latest novel, toying with and finally consuming its citizens with the innocent cruelty of a cat with its prey--it's nothing personal, but it needs the meat. A cross between a film noir and a Greek tragedy, with more than its share of sex and drugs (though no rock 'n' roll), The Good-Bye Angel begins with a murder and ends in a panorama of ambition, obsession, libido, hypocrisy, and loneliness.