...seamlessly translated ... This is an artfully plotted tale about race, privilege and guilt. Scott circles around the inflammatory event that occurred decades before – a racist comment that provoked a violent fight among teenagers – and demonstrates how quickly prejudice spreads, often with lifelong repercussions ... Scott’s characterisation is superb. Federico’s complexities are revealed through his interactions with others, their different views of him, his public image and inner angst ... The stream-of-consciousness narrative, long sentences, paragraphs that run over pages and lack of speech tags are challenging, but careful reading proves richly rewarding. Phenotypes educates and entertains in equal measure.
Scott approaches complex national and personal questions with tremendous thoughtfulness and skill. Phenotypes is a short novel styled by engaging and epically long sentences, and there are no throwaway moments or scenes ... national history and individual perspectives collide ... Scott offers insights on Brazil, Federico and human nature as the specific becomes universal during an everyday moment ... we're treated to a keen, multifaceted and subtle look at the cultural and personal complexities of race and color and history. Phenotypes is entertaining. It's brilliant and emotionally resonant. I put it down days ago, and I'm still walking around with it.
Phenotypes offers few answers—and expecting them from a single work of fiction would be futile. Instead, Scott opens the floodgates to a myriad of questions, probing the uncomfortable topics that his fictional (but all too real) bureaucrats would rather leave undisturbed. Posed as the novel’s eyes and ears, Federico is the lens through which we view these issues, and the means by which we understand the racially charged situation in Brazil ... It is this personal angle that brings the novel’s broad, sweeping themes into sharp focus. But the novel’s most striking feature—one that jumps out from the first page—is Scott’s sprawling and idiosyncratic writing style. He favours long sentences (in fact, the novel’s second sentence spans twenty-one lines and is incredibly broad in scope), but the writing is taut and polished, never rambling ... Phenotypes is innovative, deftly precise in its form, and utterly profound in its content. Scott’s work in bringing contemporary urgencies into fiction is uncomfortable and often unsettling, but necessary—and, ultimately, unforgettable.
[A] rather brisk novel that punctures the country’s fantasy of being a post-racial state and leaves readers scrambling for a sense of closure that it cannot possibly provide ... This longue durée of anti-Blackness plays out with a chaotic energy reflected both in the novel’s form and in the structure of its sentences. The propulsive style of Scott’s novel Nowhere People returns; in Daniel Hahn’s translation, sentences collapse into one another via comma splices, as if there were little time for full stops ... Phenotypes underscores how difficult antiracist projects can be at any scale ... As these matters mesh with socioeconomic inequality, police brutality, interpersonal violence and state surveillance, Scott’s characters quickly abandon the possibility of a comprehensive solution in favor of stopgap measures that may or may not work. Such are the inadequacies, the novel asserts, of treating entrenched and systemic issues as if they are only skin-deep.
Federico grows up in the 1970s and 1980s. His hometown, Porto Alegre—its food, its popular spots—is rendered in bright, distinctive details, so that, despite the story’s universal themes of race and acceptance, Phenotypes could not have taken place anywhere else ... The army evaluation scene is especially horrific, but the most crushing demonstrations of racism are the quiet wounds that Federico himself accidentally inflicts. It is a stinging reminder that even the most well-meaning people must reckon with notions of race and prejudice ... Phenotypes is a complex, stream-of-consciousness novel about race, culture, and deciding for oneself where one belongs.
Scott follows up Nowhere People with a profound story of colorism and familial loyalty set in Brazil ... Scott’s portrayal of how colorism functions in Federico’s own family, and society at large, is nuanced and careful ... The multiple layers combine for a mesmerizing and mature story.
A former lawyer and activist, Scott pours out his indictment of Brazil in long, overflowing sentences that are equal parts outrage and cutting humor ... it is not easy to shake off. A blast of righteous (and spot-on) indignation by a formidable Brazilian author.
