Latest Review: "Anonymous Celebrity" by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece that I wrote on Ignacio de Loyola Brandao’s Anonymous Celebrity. It’s a great book—one of my favorites of 2009 (so far)—and worth reading (especially if you liked Zero . . . all four hundred of you out there who bought it, that is).

Here’s the beginning of the review:

Ignacio de Loyola Brandao’s fourth book to appear in English, Anonymous Celebrity is most definitely the novel of his most concerned with contemporary issues, and may well be his funniest and richest novel to date. I say this as a big fan of Brandao’s writing (and not just because it’s fun to pronounce his name), in particular Zero, which was my introduction to his odd, unsettled world and was a book that we reprinted during my time at Dalkey Archive Press.

Zero is a complex, dangerous book that tells of the life of its main character through myriad of techniques, styles, typographies, and (occasionally contradictory) storylines. All infused with a great, sick sense of humor, and enough political shit to result in the book being banned by the Brazilian government when it was first published.

Brandao’s fragmented technique (and especially his penchant for dropping crazy over-sized fonts into his text) is employed in both Teeth under the Sun (also Dalkey) and And Still the Earth (currently out-of-print), but not nearly to the same symphonic effect as it is in Zero and now Anonymous Celebrity.

Anonymous Celebrity was first published in Brazil in 2002, and in contrast to his earlier books, Brandao has replaced his concerns about living under an extreme political regime with the idea of how to live in an age of media saturation and an overwhelming obsession with celebrity.

Even prior to the ending (which sort of is a rug pulling bit that would’ve been more effective—in my opinion—if it was a bit more concise and even more devastating), this is a tricksy sort of book narrated by a totally unreliable narrator. Check that: he’s not necessarily “unreliable,” rather, he’s someone obsessed with image, with celebrity, with being famous, being known, and knows that celebrity is based in falsehood, half-truths and contrived settings.

Click here for the full review.