Brawling, bawdy, and picaresque, The Incredible Brazilian uses the opening of seventeenth-century Brazil as the setting for the adventures of one of literature's least lovable but most likeable rogues: Gregório Peixoto da Silva Xavier. The second son of a prosperous planter, Gregório is fourteen when the novel opens - a fop and a virgin, his self-esteem knows no bounds. Neither does his enterprise, and he soon rids himself of his unwanted innocence and embarks upon a series of wildly comic, wonderfully fantastical escapades. By the novel's end, Gregório has - if not honorably, then with great daring - made, lost, and made again several fortunes. Told with wry and mocking wit, Gregório's life story is a delightfully outrageous ribald comedy in an absorbing and compelling adventure. The Incredible Brazilian is the first volume in a trilogy that, following its hero through several incarnations, will culminate in the revolutionary politics of present-day Brazil. In this first book, the exploration of this raw new land is a counterpoint to the extravagances of its hero. Here, Gregório and Brazil come together: young, violent, and rapacious, aping the manners of the Old World while pushing forward the frontiers of the New. As Gregório penetrates this vast country - from ostentatious plantations and gaudy cities to primitive Indian villages and rowdy mining camps, from slave quarter to prison to unmapped jungle - all the vitality and abrasiveness of a frontier society come fully and vividly to life. Praise for The Incredible Brazilian: The Native: 'A picaresque prose epic of Brazilian history written by a Pakistani-born British poet who lives in Texas could not fail to be remarkable. The Incredible Brazilian is also genuinely comic, truly wise, and altogether fascinating' Thomas Berger 'It's a long long time since art of the novel remembered its origins in Petronius and Rabelais and picaresque Spain, but Mr. Ghose's The Incredible Brazilian is right in the tradition. It is boiling hot and rich in sex and imbroglios and roguery: it is in fact picaresque for a permissive age. Ghose's ability to reincarnate the life of early colonial Brazil is quite astonishing and his hero is a giant creation. This is what fiction is meant to be about: life bigger than life' Anthony Burgess 'Gregório is a survivor, a conquistador without a compass, a traveller who seldom arrives. He is betrothed, swindles, dispossessed, thrown into prison, smeared with oil and sold into slavery ... It is a considerable feat of the imagination and novelistic ventriloquism ... one looks forward to Gregório's further adventures' Paul Theroux, The Times '... a wild and picaresque romance of seventeenth-century Brazil recounted in Baron Munchausen style by a rumbustious adventurer, Gregório ... It is all full of zest and excitement' The Sunday Times
About the Author: Zulfikar Ghose is internationally known as a critic, poet and novelist. His books include Jets from Orange, Figures of Enchantment and a trilogy, The Incredible Brazilian. His work has received praise from T. S. Eliot, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles and Michael Moorcock, amongst others. Born in 1935 in Sialkot, Pakistan, Ghose emigrated to England in 1952. After graduating from Keele University with a BA in English and Philosophy, he lived in London where he was a cricket correspondent for The Observer and wrote for the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and the Western Daily Press. In 1960, he met the novelist and poet B. S. Johnson, with whom he became close friends, and in the same year he joined The Group - a collection of poets who met at Edward Lucie-Smith's house in Chelsea to discuss their work. These meetings were attended by, amongst others, George MacBeth and Philip Hobsbaum, and occasionally by Ted Hughes. In 1963, Zulfikar Ghose was put forward for the E. C. Gregory Award by the judges T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Henry Moore and Howard Sergeant; but when Eliot fell ill, his place on the committee was taken by a solicitor who raised an objection concerning Ghose's nationality. The committee decided to overcome the legal hurdle by giving him a "Special Award". His works comprise books and poems published on both sides of the Atlantic and where his rich prose has been described as "remarkable, imagistic, witty and original" and all his writing "sheer literary pleasure, exciting, effective, evocative and the beauty of great art". In 1969, Ghose emigrated to the U.S.A after an invitation to teach at the University of Texas at Austin. He had tea with Patricia Nixon at the White House who presented him with a copy of The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. He became a US citizen in 2004 and went on to hold the distinguished position of Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor in Creative Writing. Ghose, now retired from full-time teaching, is the Professor Emeritus, University Texas at Austin. He lives with his wife Helena de la Fontaine, an artist from Brazil, whom he married in London in 1964.