It is 1940. In Rio de Janeiro, a crisis is brewing. The brilliant womanizing poet, Antonio Bruno, has just died, and his seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters is vacant. Who will replace him? Colonel Agnaldo Sampaio Pereira, chief of security of the New State Dictatorship, who welcomed Nazi control with unqualified joy, resolves it shall be he. But he does not count on the resistance organized by two intrepid octogenarians who rally to their standard a powerful group as determined to keep the colonel out of the Academy as he is to get in. Thus battle is engaged, in which the international forces of Nazism and the national forces of reaction and totalitarianism unite against two old men and four remarkable women-a typically fiery actress, a dressmaker who is not averse to a little part-time paid companionship, the wife of one of Brazil s richest men, and an industrialist s radical daughter-all former mistresses of the poet Bruno. Amado subtitled his novel A Fable to Kindle a Hope. It is a just description, because this book, with its great, glorious doses of wit, is a ferocious and heartening cry for freedom.
