PEDRO AND MARQUES TAKE STOCK

A look at poverty and ambition in Brazil.

The title characters begin this vibrant and punchy novel (Falero’s first to be translated into English) as stock workers at a Porto Alegre supermarket. The ball gets rolling when Pedro—the bookish smooth talker of the pair—takes “stock of the world around him” and realizes that all his problems have one solution: money. Meanwhile, Marques—more demure and gruff— is repeatedly “zapped” by “the stinger of self-hatred” as he imagines the meager life in store for his children. He, too, resolves to escape poverty. In a long-winded and entertaining dialogue, Pedro primes Marques on socialism (“The guy was called Marques, like me?” “No. Marx, with the letter ex”), convincing him they deserve a little comfort and luxury—even if comfort and luxury mean breaking a few bourgeois laws. Everyone has “to choose between being a thug or a slave,” Pedro says more than once. But once they hatch a scheme to finally move up in the world, the two friends spend the duration toeing that line, eager to attain power and dignity without betraying their values. Falero tells this story in delightful prose. Meandering sentences and wry repetitions breathe personality into the characters’ inner lives, and the landscape of Porto Alegre’s slums is rendered with forlorn affection. Occasional metaphors sing: Pedro is at one point “so tired he felt soft like butter”; we see one character’s “sorrow brim over and touch” another. Through Falero’s lovable characters, readers will meditate on violence and respectability within the death-trap of runaway capitalism. “When reality walks through the door,” he warns, “there isn’t a single smile that doesn’t fly out the window.

Head-on against the grim indignities of an unequal world, Falero’s poetic novel embraces humor and empathy.