Brazilian actor and writer Torres returns to fiction with a tale about a struggling soap opera actor named Mario, whose decision to play King Lear in a high-concept staging has disastrous consequences.
Eric M. B. Becker renders Torres’s blurred lines of the protagonist’s fiction and reality (narrated in the first person) in a prose that flows like the action and lines of a play, drawing the reader even further into the scene ... Torres’s experience as an actress takes center stage in her prose as sentences and action flow seamlessly, carrying the reader along on the edge of their seat. Translated skillfully into English, Becker replicates this movement by stringing events together with commas and introducing some Portuguese style into the English ... Eric M. B. Becker’s translation wonderfully represents the Brazilian text, engaging with Brazilian culture, discourse, and history in English. Not only does the flowing prose come to the fore in both the Portuguese and the English, but the translation also forcibly engages with the translation of Shakespeare.
Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres writes about what she knows, while writer, editor and translator Eric M.B. Becker provides English-language audiences ready access to Torres's affecting performance on the page. Having alchemized theater into her standout debut, The End, Torres returns with another tragicomedy about the cost of 'this bind they call fame'—the irresistible lure, the blinding reception, the fickle adoration and the unrelenting need for reinventions.
Brazilian actress Torres follows the frenetic collapse of an actor’s career and his masculine bluster with piercing humor in her latest ... Torres’s zippy momentum still leaves space for an emotional coda, and she has an impressive knack for showing Mario’s vulnerability. This resonant story of an actor’s accelerating decline will charm readers who enjoy madcap farce.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
