- Paperback: 187 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; New edition edition (23 Mar 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747545731
- ISBN-13: 978-0747545736
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,334,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Brazilian writer Patricia Melo follows up her impressive debut novel The Killer(winner of the French Prix Deux Oceans, 1996 and the German Deutcher Krimi Preis in 1998) with another unusual crime thriller In Praise of Lies. While The Killer sets a bang-bang pace, this murder is meticulous, slow and fanged. Pulp crime writer Jose falls for Melissa while researching snake venom as a weapon at the serological institute where she works. She enlists him and his plots to help kill her husband, Ronald. This puts Jose off his stride and his book outlines to his publisher, which pilfer from Camus, Poe and Dostoevsky, become more obtuse, witty and hopelessly non-commercial. The snake chosen for the task is so lethargic that Jose muses: "It's not for nothing that killers prefer to settle the matter with automatics." Ronald refuses to die easily. Jose then switches to authoring self-help manuals and becomes a bestselling guru, instructing people how to live, while Melissa keeps telling him how to kill. Melo has enormous fun with her pastiche of current publishing trends, right down to anticipating the success of titles like The Little Book of Calm. Self-love affirmations are dangerous to a murderer.--Cherry Smyth
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Jose Guber is in love with a deadly woman - Melissa, expert on poisonous snakes, which is what Jose wants to work into his latest crime novel. Jose unashamedly plagiarises his plots from the classics. Then Melissa makes it clear she would like to adapt one of his plots to kill her husband.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
I read this book to help me understand Brazilian culture before I visited the country. The book was a good, fun read and gave me an understanding of Brazilian culture, sense of humour, personalities et cetera.
Format:Paperback
If one accepts the thesis that pulp fiction addresses the needs of the newly literate who progress to more 'literary' forms as they grow increasingly comfortable and sophisticated with reading, it would be clear that in developing countries like Brazil, cheap and cheerful dime novels would be extremely popular. In her darkly satirical book 'In Praise of Lies' Patricia Melo does not address the consumers of this inexpensive literature; rather, she prefers to poke fun at the industry that supplies it. So we have Jose Gruber, a hack who copies the plots from greats of world literature and passes on the texts to a publisher who is unaware of Dickens and Dostoevsky; the readership doesn't know or care either. Jose falls in with a herpetologist, Melissa, who, unaware of his inspiration, believes that his is a fertile imagination. She then involves him in concocting clever plots of kill her husband, who she claims abuses her, and Jose is such a moral and physical coward that he ends up helping her. The stress results in his literary career stalling, with the publisher rejecting proposal after proposal (which lengthen in proportion to his desperation) as unworkable and uninteresting. The noirish aspects of the novel might have served to keep the plot ticking, but Melo is dissatisfied with satirising only the pulp industry and she switches her target to the self-help books that also attract a wide readership in Brazil. Between the crime committed and the unravelling of Melissa's and Jose's relationship, and his sudden success as a hack self-help author, there are suddenly too many threads in the novel, and it all gets increasingly inchoate. While the book started funny and clever, it appears towards the end as if Melo loses the plot herself. Worth a casual read, certainly.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Beware the Snake Charmer
13 Mar 2000
Format:Paperback
What a wonderful little book! Extremely innovative, tightly written, just what a mystery should be. We know where the story leads, but the way to that goal is utterly fascinating.The author never insults our intelligence. Quite a reprieve from all those shlock writings. And cudos to the translator!
Funny but rather rambling Brazilian Noir
21 Mar 2011
Format:Paperback
If one accepts the thesis that pulp fiction addresses the needs of the newly literate who progress to more 'literary' forms as they grow increasingly comfortable and sophisticated with reading, it would be clear that in developing countries like Brazil, cheap and cheerful dime novels would be extremely popular. In this darkly satirical book 'In Praise of Lies' Patricia Melo does not address the consumers of this inexpensive literature; rather, she prefers to poke fun at the industry that supplies it. So we have Jose Gruber, a hack who copies the plots from greats of world literature and passes on the texts to a publisher who is unaware of Dickens and Dostoevsky; the readership doesn't know or care either. Jose falls in with a herpetologist, Melissa, who, unaware of his inspiration, believes that his is a fertile imagination. She then involves him in concocting clever plots of kill her husband, who she claims abuses her, and Jose is such a moral and physical coward that he ends up helping her. The stress results in his literary career stalling, with the publisher rejecting proposal after proposal (which lengthen in proportion to his desperation) as unworkable and uninteresting. The noirish aspects of the novel might have served to keep the plot ticking, but Melo is dissatisfied with satirising only the pulp industry and she switches her target to the self-help books that also attract a wide readership in Brazil. Between the crime committed and the unravelling of Melissa's and Jose's relationship, and his sudden success as a hack self-help author, there are suddenly too many threads in the novel, and it all gets increasingly inchoate. While the book started funny and clever, it appears towards the end as if Melo loses the plot herself. Worth a casual read, certainly.
A delightful short read
28 May 2006
Format:Paperback
This is a crime novel, a noir novel, a pleasant amusement. The protagonist is a hack writer whose communications with his publisher(s) serve to introduce several chapters. These memos add a humorous second plot line to the story itself. Love and murder circle around each other in this tale, with the after-effects of murder being more powerful than murder itself. Decent characters, decent plot, a modum of suspense and a pleasant afternoon read.
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