Praise for City of God
“A Scarface-like urban epic, bursting with encyclopedic, graphic descriptions of violence, punctuated with lyricism and longing.” —Publishers Weekly
“Lins, himself a survivor of the City of God, has a knack for making vignettes of such unremitting desperation remarkably lyrical.” —Library Journal
“What non-Portuguese speaking folks may not know is that Fernando Mereilles and Katia Lund’s epic film was adapted from an equally epic novel by Paulo Lins… City of God the novel should definitely be read as a work in its own right.” —The Fader
“Raw, brutal, and graphically violent, City of God, by Paolo Lins, is a multifaceted story about hellish life and early death in a Brazilian slum, where family ties can be severed as easily as a kite string.” —Lylah M. Alphonse, The Boston Globe
“Paulo Lins is shaking up the Brazilian literary market with City of God.... In the hands of Paulo Lins, the City of God transforms into a metaphor for hell, described with the sensibility of a poet. A vertiginous novel whose reportage explodes in the reader’s face as gusts of words, disturbing and inflaming the conscience.” —Correio Braziliense
“A book-length beating... [that] deserves to be remembered as an event... A momentum that will rivet the reader until the end... Intensely visual in the style of an action film. The deliberate and insolent insistence of the lyrical tone... gives the novel a distinctive streak of resistance, of refusal, that is difficult to imagine in a writer less resolutely nonconformist.” —Foha de Sao Paulo
“City of God is a delirious book... [with] lyrical peaks, and the velocity of a gunshot.” —Veja
“Compared to the film’s aesthetic, which has been compared to that of Tarantino, Lins’s novel is throughout a story almost journalistic in nature, one that could have been written by Kapuscinski or by the Truman Capote of In Cold Blood.” —Richard Ruiz Garzón, La Razón(Spain)
“Just as the conquerors invented a language to describe an undiscovered landscape and to make it their own, Lins conquers with words the subworld of the favelas–frightening, maddening, claustrophobic, in reality only imaginable in fantastic terms. City of God is an irreproachable and necessary work, an impressive immersion in the dominions of Mr. Hyde.” —Javier Aparicio Maydeu, El Pa’s (Spain)
“Heartbreaking... The routineness of death, its stutters and repetitions, are the success of the book, even if they do not make for easy reading.” —Gilles Lapouge, La Quinzaine Littraire(France)
“The novel recounts several years in the life of the City of God . . . ending in a terrible gang war worthy of a Scorsese film. Eye-opening.” —Guy Duplat, La Libre Belgique (Belgium)
Lins's 1997 fiction debut-the source of the 2002 film published in English for the first time-chronicles two generations over three decades in the infamous Rio de Janeiro City of God, "a neo-slum of concrete, brimming dealer-doorways, sinister-silences and cries of despair." From the slum's creation in the early 1960s for flood victims, through the rise of disco and cocaine in the 1970s, to the horrific gang wars of the 1980s, Lins traces the rise and fall of myriad, often teenaged gangsters for whom guns, girls and drugs are the tools of power. While the film traces the divergent paths of two childhood friends, the novel rushes from vignette to vignette, with an ever-changing cast of characters with names like "Good Life," "Beelzebub" and "Hellraiser." Years, and pages, pass in a haze of smoking, drinking, snorting lines of cocaine, dancing sambas, swearing and planning the next big score. Guns dispense justice; the price for disrespect, whether to a spouse, a friend or the favela, is torture or death. Lins, who grew up in the City, lets the horror speak for itself. He serves up a Scarface-like urban epic, bursting with encyclopedic, graphic descriptions of violence, punctuated with lyricism and longing. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
After being adapted in 2002 for the screen as City of God, this 1997 novel of Brazil's wretched City of God housing project is finally available in English. Unlike the film, which follows the lives of two childhood friends, the novel is a sprawling epic of gang life in the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro with a cast of hundreds, mostly Afro-Brazilians, who have names like Carrots, Russian Mouse, Two-Wheeler, Sparrow, and Night Owl and engage in an endless round of drinking, smoking, and robbery. Otavio is so short and scrawny he can hardly handle the weight of a pistol. Hellraiser's father is a drunk, his mother's a pro in the Red Light District, and, worst of all, his brother's a faggot. Knockout rationalizes that killing a member of another gang isn't even a sin; it's doing the locals a favor. Gentle, pot-smoking Rocket longs to escape this world, buy a camera with a shitload of lenses, and win photography prizes. Lins, himself a survivor of the City of God, has a knack for making vignettes of such unremitting desperation remarkably lyrical. Recommended for most collections.-Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
A bleak panorama of slum life in Rio's Cidade de Deus (the "City of God") under three decades of gang rule. The basis for a 2002 Brazilian film, this tale defies summary. The movie, at least, imposes structure, via the main character Rocket's point of view, as opposed to the novel's sprawling, free-form litany of unremitting violence amid the blocks and houses of slums. In three sections covering the 1960s, '70s and '80s, Lins follows the exploits of three primary gangsters: Hellraiser, Sparrow and Tiny. A multiethnic horde of minor characters flit in and out of the gangsters' truncated lives as they plot and execute holdups, whack friends, relatives and rivals, obsessively pursue women, drugs, samba prowess, revenge and loot. Rocket, a bit player here, hangs with the Boys, upwardly mobile City dwellers who are into weed, rock concerts and beach parties, but manage to stay in school and avoid becoming thug proteges. An aspiring photographer, Rocket can't bring himself to rob: The potential victims are too nice. Hellraiser introduces Pipsqueak to crime when he enlists the punk sociopath to help in a motel heist. When Hellraiser is wasted by Detective Beelzebub, Pipsqueak, now self-dubbed Tiny, and his best friend Sparrow take control of the City's economic lifeblood, its drug dens. After Tiny hears of a vicious rape/murder, he punishes the culprits Butucatu and Potbelly for infringing his ban on crime against City residents. Gunning for Tiny, Butucatu kills Sparrow. Tiny reigns alone, but not for long-envious of Knockout's good looks, he rapes the hitherto solid citizen's fiancee. This triggers full-blown gang war, which divides the City into zones controlled by Knockout's growing army,and Tiny's increasingly fractious band of cohorts. Much bloodshed later, the chaos in the City endures-only the perpetrators change. Tiny meets his end at the hands of a novice gangster much like his former self. Numbing scenes of horrific carnage and brutality make for painful, but somehow compulsory, reading.