IT'S ALL RIVER

A prostitute falls for the only man who can resist her.

Madeira’s novel, a bestseller in her native Brazil, opens without any preamble: “Whore. There’s no other name for Lucy.” Lucy “worked in a whorehouse, lived in a whorehouse,” our helpful narrator explains. “But that’s not the only reason she was a whore.” If it were, she’d be afforded “more respectful names, such as sex worker or prostitute.” But she isn’t. Lucy is the most vulgar whore in town. Worse than all her provocations, though, is the fact that she enjoys her work. And while “an upstanding citizen will tolerate a whore so long as they can feel sorry for them,” Madeira writes, “…Lucy was too self-possessed, depriving respectable women of the chance to exercise compassion.” Madeira, translated into English by Entrekin, is at her best along these ostentatious but wry lines. Lucy is soon captivated by the one man who turns her down—Venâncio, husband to Dalva. The young couple had a storied courtship, but a single irrevocable action has destroyed both their lives. If Madeira had stopped here, her story might have approached perfection: In its early pages, it achieves a kind of forceful lampoonishness that inspires both laughter and sobs. The witty prose rushes the reader through pages and pages about desire—what it means to desire, to be desired, to be driven helpless by desire (or, as Madeira has it, as a young Lucy observes a man’s “impotence in the face of his own hard-on”). But Madeira strays too far from the heated center of her own story, including more backstories than the slender novel will support—backstories for parents and relatives and friends of minor characters that don’t do much to further the plot. She’d have done better with some minor pruning.

A feverish, obsessive, filthy book—and a terribly fun one.