Olho de Rei

A writer named Edgard inherits more than a hundred notebooks filled by his father, Jean Lafitte, a Frenchman he barely knew, and reads them hoping to understand the man who was never there. Written in an attic room in Marseille in his final years, the notebooks move between that present and a long, restless past. Having blown up a tank, Lafitte escapes the Nazis by fleeing to Brazil, where he waits tables at Rio's Confeitaria Colombo, then turns to smuggling, cuts hair, serves a senator as his valet and at last opens a bar under his own name. Along the way he changes jobs, lovers and wives, and Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s passes before him. Both narrators keep reminding the reader how much of a life slips through any telling of it.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

272 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Migration (assigned by AI)

Set in

Brazil, 1940s–1960s

First published

2005 by Record

Author's age

61 when first published

ISBN

9788501074744 (original)