Finished July 2026
This was the second of my two Brazilian books, and about as far from Dom Casmurro as you can get while staying inside the same country. Patrícia Melo is Brazil’s best-selling crime writer, and I went in braced for a whodunnit. It isn’t one. There is no detective, no puzzle, and no mystery whatever about who did what — you watch the narrator do all of it. What Melo is actually writing is a psychological study of a man sliding, one small decision at a time, into serious crime. It is an easy, breezy read.
The setting is contemporary Brazil at its far western edge: Corumbá, a heat-soaked border town in the Pantanal wetlands, up against Bolivia and the Paraguay River. The narrator is never named. He ran a telemarketing boiler room in São Paulo until he slapped a junior employee, she killed herself, and he was fired. He has come out to the border to live slowly and close to nature, in the way that people who have wrecked their lives in cities imagine they might.
He is not a good man, and Melo is unsentimental about it. He stays with a cousin until the cousin’s wife makes it impossible — she comes after him, he holds out for a while, and then he doesn’t — and he is unfaithful to his girlfriend besides. Then, fishing on the riverbank one morning, he watches a small plane come down. He reaches the pilot, unbuckles him, thinks about hauling him out, and concludes that it would be a great deal of work and the man is probably going to die anyway. So he leaves him and takes his belongings instead: an expensive watch, and a backpack with a kilo of cocaine in it. That calculation — not cruelty, just a man declining to be inconvenienced — is the whole novel in miniature.
The cocaine leads to a series of incidents that put him in debt to a Bolivian gang, and the debt makes blackmailing the dead pilot’s wealthy family for whereabouts of their son’s corpse look like the only way out. What Melo does well is the gradient. There is never a moment where he decides to become a criminal. Each step is small, each is explicable, and by the end he is standing somewhere he would not have recognised from the start.
Two things stayed with me more than the plot did. One is his tenderness toward his landlady, an old Guató woman — the novel says “Indian” — who is worn down daily by her daughter-in-law. He is decent to her, unshowily, and it sits oddly and rather beautifully next to everything else he does. The other is Sulamita, his girlfriend, who begins as the straight arrow of the book, a police employee who follows the rules, and who — ground down by the corruption she watches among her own colleagues — ends up helping him plant a fake body for the family to recover.
Which is the question the book leaves you holding. What is a body actually for? The father, at the end, knows perfectly well the corpse is not his son. He says nothing, because his wife has finally found peace in having something to bury. Whether that is a kindness or a second theft, Melo declines to say. I have been thinking about it since.
My Reading Life 