Magical realism.

A Death in Brazil

A Book of Omissions

Peter Robb 

Henry Holt and Company, $26, 329 pp.

At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

Travels through Paraguay

John Gimlette

Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 362 pp.

Nonfiction about foreign lands and peoples can take the traditional form of travel writing, in which authors' descriptions of their own exploits provide the lens through which readers acquire insights into cultures not their own. The best examples of this genre transmit a sense of enthusiasm that bestirs the imagination. Thus, Richard Halliburton's popular volumes, beginning with The Royal Road to Romance in 1925 and ending with The Book of Marvels in 1937, made armchair adventurers of countless Americans, and at the same time educated them.

A different approach, popularized by Luigi Barzini in The Italians, is more antiseptic, serious, and comprehensive, eschewing the thrills generated by first-person accounts of encounters with the exotic, and offering instead detailed, detached portraits of a people, etched against a discrete historical, cultural, and geographic context.

Some authors combine these styles by telling stories of their own escapades, and at the same time using them as points of departure for meditations on aspects of a country's past and present, and on the characteristics shared by its inhabitants. Peter Robb, an Australian, and John Gimlette, an Englishman, subject Brazil and Paraguay respectively to this treatment. Their books offer similarities and contrasts that demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of this way of writing about other countries. Shared negative characteristics include an inexcusable lack of an index and the cryptic archness of the latter's title (At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig) and the former's subtitle (A Book of Omissions). On the positive side is each author's vivid writing style and keen eye for detail. A singular dissimilarity emerges from references each makes to Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo. Gimlette sees it as the story of Paraguay, while for Robb the book conjures up images of Rio de Janeiro and the experiences of Italian immigrants in Brazil.

Brazil and Paraguay are neighbors, each with a distinctive language, setting it apart from the rest of the continent. (The Brazilians speak Portuguese, while most Paraguayans speak Guarani, a native tongue.) They share a long, porous border that facilitates migration and smuggling. Indeed, Brazilians constantly pour across the frontier, where they buy and carry back contraband and thinly disguised counterfeit goods, some of which, as Gimlette relates, have photocopied labels. The two countries also share a history that includes being adversaries in a horrific nineteenth-century war that cost Paraguay nine-tenths of its male population.

Unsurprisingly, Brazil's impact on Paraguay has been much more significant than the reverse, because Brazil is more like a continent, while Paraguay is an isolated, landlocked, impoverished backwater on the way to nowhere. Yet as Gimlette demonstrates, the latter has its own special allure that stands up well to the irresistible seductiveness of Brazil.

At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig conveys the author's fondness for Paraguay and depicts its surrealism and multiple eccentricities with sympathy and sensitivity. The country is not a tourist attraction. Indeed, for centuries it was extremely difficult to reach, creating an isolation that, as Gimlette points out, "enabled the Paraguayans to experiment, to try out all the different shapes and sizes of tyranny." On the other hand, it has drawn to it an odd potpourri of immigrants, like nineteenth-century Germans seeking to found an Aryan-supremacist colony, eighteenth-century Anabaptists, Australian socialists, and Americans seeking to discover in Paraguay their vanishing Wild West.

As a subject for what might be called the mixed approach, Paraguay is far more manageable than Brazil. Gimlette is able to visit the sites of the most notable colonies and talk with surviving members. More important, he takes the reader on a tour of the battlegrounds of the two major clashes that define Paraguayan history. In the War of the Triple Alliance (1871-75), the brutal dictator Francisco Solano Lopez managed to enmesh his country in an armed struggle against the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Although the Paraguayans fought bravely, they died almost to the point of extinction. Brazilian troops finally trapped Lopez in a stream, and inflicted fatal wounds on him. His successors converted him into a national hero, which reveals more about them than their nation's history.

Gimlette's account of this bloodbath is so numbing that his description of the gruesome Chaco War (1932-35), an unsuccessful attempt by neighboring Bolivia to relieve Paraguay of a barren wasteland constituting two-thirds of its territory, seems almost anticlimactic. The slaughterous conflict gave Paraguay political instability that eventually produced its most recent tyrant, Alfredo Stroessner, who took power in 1954 and ruled with an iron fist for thirty-five years.

Peter Robb has uneven results with his combined travel writing and ruminating about Brazil, mainly because the subject of A Death in Brazil is so huge and unwieldy. Some of his descriptive passages are composed with great power and elegance. The book opens with a harrowing account of his escape from death at the hands of a knife-wielding young Brazilian he unwisely brought back to his apartment in Rio de Janeiro--a memorable introduction to the insecurity that now plagues a once gentle land. His portrait of the city of Recife in Northeast Brazil is superb, and his riffs on Brazilian food are entertaining as well as instructive.

His choice of centerpiece, the death referenced in his title, however, is problematic. The mysterious murder of Paulo Cesar Farias, the corrupt associate of President Fernando Collor, who resigned in 1992 to avoid impeachment, has now receded into the mists of time, a footnote to a historical footnote. The youthful, athletic, photogenic Collor owed his meteoric rise to the lack of a viable alternative to the candidate of the Workers' Party, Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva. He frightened Brazil's establishment so much that they turned to a relative unknown from the Northeast. What they received in return was a scandal-filled soap opera involving sex, family quarrels, and graft on a grand scale, with Farias (known as "PC") stealing millions of dollars. Four years after Collor's fall, police discovered the bodies of "PC" and a girlfriend, a crime that has not yet been solved.

A Death in Brazil illuminates with relentless honesty the dark side of its subject, but at the same time it slights the joyfulness and spirituality that remain a crucial part of "Brazilian-ness." Perhaps the Brazilians, unlike the somewhat less complex Paraguayans, are too difficult to explain in a narrative built around an author's personal experiences. The insights that Robb does convey, though, make A Death in Brazil a mesmerizing read and a worthy companion to Gimlette's account of his Paraguayan adventures.

Joseph A. Page, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, is the author of The Brazilians (Perseus).

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