House of the Fortunate Buddhas
João Ubaldo Ribeiro
2011, Dalkey Archive
147 pages
IT SHOULD perhaps come as no surprise that when, given the choice of the seven deadly sins on which to write a popular novel under the commission of Editora Objetiva, the Brazilian writer João Ubaldo Ribeiro chose lust. The result is House of the Fortunate Buddhas, and the author certainly lives up to his task in a short but compelling novel that redefines uninhibited and has raised not just eyebrows. His anonymous narrator uses her wit and will to achieve physical and emotional liberation in 1940s provincial Brazil, where female sexuality was neither tolerated nor recognised. Read it and you will be as fulfilled as the sensuous protagonist eventually is. – EC
