The Collected Stories of Moacyr Scliar
1999
First Published
4.17
Average Rating
442
Number of Pages
From Brazil's most distinguished and important Jewish writer comes this anthology comprised of six in The Carnival of the Animals, Scliar uses political allegory to convey what was normally censored during the height of repression under Brazil's military regime. These tragicomic stories reveal Scliar's interest in issues of oppression, persecution, holocaust, mutability, and the interplay between good and evil. The Ballad of the False Messiah develops the theme of postponement in the sense that for Jews redemption is always postponed in a vain wait for the Messiah. In The Tremulous Earth Scliar explores cruelty and violence in the tenuous lives of his characters, but his experience as a medical doctor informs his compassion for human frailty. Scliar expands his use of fantasy and magical realism in The Dwarf in the Television Set in topics that range from Jewish prophets to marital revenge. The Enigmatic Eye has been described as a masterpiece evoking the enigmas of art and life, and in Van Gogh's Ear, Scliar uses dark and subtle humor in a collection of biblical parables. Here witchcraft, magic, conundrums, and labyrinths are shown to be part of everyday life. A final autobiographical piece ties the collections together in which Scliar discusses his membership in Jewish, medical, gaucho, and Brazilian "tribes." These powerful stories, individually humorous, bleak, or haunting, together bring a compelling voice of the Jewish Diaspora to the wide readership it deserves.
Avg Rating
4.17
Number of Ratings
30
5 STARS
40%
4 STARS
37%
3 STARS
23%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
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goodreads
Author
Moacyr Scliar
Author · 20 books
Moacyr Jaime Scliar (born March 23, 1937) is a Brazilian writer and physician. Scliar is best known outside Brazil for his 1981 novel Max and the Cats (Max e os Felinos), the story of a young man who flees Berlin after he comes to the attention of the Nazis for having had an affair with a married woman. Making his way to Brazil, his ship sinks, and he finds himself alone in a dinghy with a jaguar who had been travelling in the hold.[1] The story of the jaguar and the boy was picked up by Yann Martel for his own book Life of Pi, winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize, in which Pi is trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger
