Brazil

3.5

Ian McDonald's books are so vivid and captivating, and I always feel as though I have learned a lot about whichever culture the story is set in. I'm fascinated by his switching of the places where the book story happens while being able to really immerse the reader into that place culture.

Regarding Brasyl, the author evoked a pretty vivid picture of Brazil, but while having a great story, this book is one of the books that I was impatient to be done with reading. Perhaps because the first 40% of the book was all about character and world-building but in the end, a few of these characters, in my opinion, were left fragmented and undeveloped. After that, the story gains the pace, and I binge-read it in two days.

Brushing the lives of different characters living in Brazil in different times and centuries, the author finally has their stories strangely overlapping in a universe comprehensible only through the prism of mystical believes of indigenous people from the Amazon, mixed with some of the most baffling theories and hypothesis in contemporary physics -quantum theory, multiverse, computation, etc. A very good book but definitely, not an easy read.