Spilt Milk

by Chico Buarque (Author) and Alison Entrekin (Translator)

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From world-renowned Brazilian writer Chico Buarque comes a stylish, imaginative tale of love, loss, and longing, played out across multiple generations of one Brazilian family. At once jubilant and painfully nostalgic, playful and devastatingly urgent, Spilt Milk cements Chico Buarque’s reputation as a masterful storyteller.

As Eulálio Assumpção lies dying in a Brazilian public hospital, his daughter and the attending nurses are treatedwhether they like it… (more)

As Eulálio Assumpção lies dying in a Brazilian public hospital, his daughter and the attending nurses are treatedwhether they like it or notto his last, rambling monologue. Ribald, hectoring, and occasionally delusional, Eulálio reflects on his past, present, and futureon his privileged, plantation-owning family; his father’s philandering with beautiful French whores; his own half-hearted career as a weapons dealer; the eventual decline of the family fortune; and his passionate courtship of the wife who would later abandon him. As Eulálio wanders the sinuous twists and turns of his own fragmented memories, Buarque conjures up a brilliantly evocative portrait of a man’s life and love, set in the broad sweep of vivid Brazilian history.

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Fiction Literary Lusophone literature

Editorial reviews (2 reviews)

Washington Independent Review of Books : Spilt Milk (January 24, 2013)

One easily imagines Buarque’s brief, intense novel transposed to the stage as a one-man tour de force for a venerable actor — or better yet, performed by the author accompanying himself with music of his own composition.

Los Angeles Times : 'Spilt Milk' by Chico Buarque plays on memory, experience (December 21, 2012)

What's most remarkable about the book, though, is not that it somehow manages to internalize more than 100 years of Brazilian history but, rather, the way it also exists almost outside that history, outside of time.