Frei Betto's Hotel Brasil is a plunge into the gritty reality of Rio de Janeiro, where ancient slave religions echo in current events and lethal pre-teen street kids shoot each other in the streets. The fiendishly clever mystery plays straight to the reader's blind spot, and the hotel provides a delightful register of guests and residents as suspects and potential victims.
Though the police are utterly corrupt and the inspector determined to make someone confess isn't much better, the heart and center of Betto's story is motorbike-riding Professor Candido, a publisher's hack forced to edit a new middlebrow magazine combining sexuality and spirituality, who volunteers at a local center to help homeless street children. Once educated to be a priest, Candido ends up sheltering a runaway street girl as the breakout of a hundred street kids from a correction facility collides with the investigation of the murdered hotel resident, an old gemstone peddler found with his head severed and eyeballs missing.
In scrupulously lean prose, with exactly the right details, Betto--a political activist and Dominican friar jailed by Brazil's military dictatorship in the 1970s--brings to life the residents at Hotel Brasil, including a political aide with a thirst for power, a pretty housecleaner who dreams of being a telenovela star, a madam who provides girls for nightclubs, a football-loving, beer-drinking journalist and an elegant professional sexual transformista, all of them watched over by a pockmarked, ponytailed caretaker and a landlady who believes in all religions equally. One by one, they are grilled by the pompous, determined inspector, a great fan of police films eager to solve the murder before the press does. But no one solves this mystery except the reader.
Hotel Brasil comes at you in short little bullets of narrative, each with its own title, sometimes no more than a paragraph or two long. The odd technique works. The actual plot is simple, but erupts into flamboyant life in Betto's characters, on which he lavishes colorful details and continuous respect. Alternately comic, insightful and harrowing in equal proportions, Betto is a thorough entertainer, painting a Rio of road accidents and shoeshine boys, kidnappings and murderous neighborhood mobs, topping it all off with a horribly satisfying ending, not to mention a glue-sniffing, revolver-toting 12-year-old street girl who threatens to walk away with the story. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: Frei Betto, a political activist and Dominican friar jailed by Brazil's military dictatorship in the 1970s, makes his literary debut with a thrilling mystery set in a very realistic Rio.