Anonymous Celebrity: nthWORD Recommends

A snippet from Brazilian author Ignacio De Loyola Brandoa's novel Anonymous Celebrity (2009, translated by Nelson H. Vieira), available from the Dalkey Archive's Latin American Literature Series, in which a celebrity doppelganger plots to murder a popular soap opera star:

"What are the great issue of our time? What moves people? What matters to them?

Breast implants... Liposuction."

"These are the important issues?"

"Think. Go deeper. Think. The small lapels on sports coats."

And then there's the war... He didn't say anything about the war... I wonder what he thinks of me, really. Of my tiny TV set, fourteen inches, black and white, playing its favorite rerun, an American film, a catastrophic super-production.

Two airplanes penetrating the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and then the towers toppling down.

What catches my attention this time is the dust and the thousands of pieces of paper flying around: paper and more paper, almost blotting out the sky, as though there was a celebration going on, all the office workers tossing torn pieces of paper out of their windows, into the street."

Photo by NCanon

posted by nthWORD at 11:54 AM