Heliopolis
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Man Booker Prize Nominee: A Latin American rags-to-riches story filled with “morbid humor and blistering social commentary” (Publishers Weekly).
Born in a São Paulo shantytown, Ludo has followed a remarkable trajectory from one side of the city’s impermeable social divide to the other. Rescued and raised by a plutocrat, Ludo is now entrenched in the gated, guarded community of the super-rich.
At twenty-seven, Ludo works for a vacuous “communications company” that markets unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born and from which he escaped. To make matters more complicated, he has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend.
Now, Ludo’s involvement in an ill-conceived supermarket launch aimed at the favela’s desperately poor population risks embroiling him in a world of violence and brutality, in this incisive novel that is by turns darkly humorous and deeply poignant.
“A triumph.” —New Statesman
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Today's S o Paulo, where great wealth and grinding poverty exist side by side, is a star player in Scudamore's absorbing second novel (after The Amnesia Clinic). Born in the slums of S o Paulo, Ludo dos Santos lucked out when, as a child, the extravagantly wealthy Z Fischer Carnicelli took in Ludo and his mother, giving her a job as domestic help and him a safe place to live. Now grown, Ludo is having trouble finding his way: the company he works for profits by exploiting those unlucky enough to live in the slums; his boss is perpetually disappointed in him (late night partying has Ludo snoozing on the bathroom floor at work); and he's having sex with Melissa, a married woman who happens to be his adoptive sister. But what begins as an innocuous run-in with a street kid launches Ludo on an existential quest that could have mortal implications. Issues of race and class spark a wily, layered, and savvy narrative ("money makes you whiter," Ludo says) where nods to Great Expectations coexist nicely with Scudamore's morbid humor and blistering social commentary.
