Heliopolis
Born in a Sao Paulo shantytown, Ludo undergoes a remarkable transformation. Directed by forces beyond his control, he first leaves, then returns to the vast city of his birth - but on the opposite side of its social divide. Now twenty-seven, he works for a vacuous 'communications company', marketing unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born. He has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend. And he has an appetite that can never be satisfied. Welcome to the world of "Heliopolis". By turns comic, violent and poignant, it is a rags-to-riches tale like no other - the story of a man whose destiny moves him around like a chess piece, and risks taking him to the brink of madness and brutality.
3.9 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
288 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-1846551888 |
| Publisher |
Harvill Secker |
| |
Born in a Sao Paulo shantytown, Ludo undergoes a remarkable transformation. Directed by forces beyond his control, he first leaves, then returns to the vast city of his birth - but on the opposite side of its social divide. Now twenty-seven, he works for a vacuous 'communications company', marketing unwanted, unaffordable products aimed at the very underclass into which he was born. He has developed an obsessive, adulterous love for his adoptive sister, whose husband is his only friend. And he has an appetite that can never be satisfied. Welcome to the world of "Heliopolis". By turns comic, violent and poignant, it is a rags-to-riches tale like no other - the story of a man whose destiny moves him around like a chess piece, and risks taking him to the brink of madness and brutality.
Reviews
The New Statesman
Simon Akam
"Scudamore is an accomplished stylist, and while his best touches are reserved for the wild psycho-geography of the city - "oiled razor wire" vying with "thickets of power lines" - he also skewers the excesses and banality of advertising with panache... if there is a weakness to this taut and engaging novel, it is that Ludo, the eventually repentant adman, is perhaps initially not wicked enough.... Nevertheless, Heliopolis remains a triumph, in particular in its depiction of third world urban sprawl."
29/01/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Sinclair McKay
"Scudamore has the superb novelist’s gift for giving vivid, sympathetic life to even second-string characters, as well as his main ones; and he also has the extraordinary power of summoning an entire brooding, smoggy city to life. Most of all, though, he has the ability to take on the heaviest of themes with the lightest and most compelling of touches, and leave you with an appetite for more. "
20/01/2009
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The Times
Kate Saunders
"Clever, funny and brilliantly inventive."
31/01/2009
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The Independent on Sunday
Brandon Robshaw
"The plot, which has a Dickensian reliance on coincidence, eventually deposits Ludo back in the favela he came from and reveals the secret of his birth. But, as with Dickens, you don't read this for the plot, but for the power of the writing, the descriptions that fizz off the page, and the lust for life."
01/02/2009
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The Financial Times
Angel Gurría-Quintana
"While acutely depicting the myriad daily interactions between supposedly segregated communities of wealthy and dispossessed, Scudamore offers a stark commentary on the myth of Brazil’s “racial democracy”... This is a kinetic novel, spiced with stunning imagery... The best writing is about São Paulo itself..."
09/02/2009
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The Guardian
Henry Shukman
"...the writing is exemplary: you feel the hand of a natural at work, one whose command of tone is strong, and who has an instinctive feel for handling a story. The plotting is neat and satisfying... Nevertheless, I couldn't help feeling that something was missing... Perhaps the plot is just a little too strategically and carefully deployed, too deliberate... And there's a further question: however well it's portrayed, how reliable is this version of Brazil?"
31/01/2009
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The Independent
Jonathan Gibbs
"The well-paced narrative flips easily between Ludo's current crisis, and his memories of the unusual upbringing that brought him to it – but things resolve themselves just that bit too readily. We leave our hero happily washed up on the shores of maturity, but it makes the novel seem less a fully-formed Bildungsroman than Act One of a larger story. Scudamore is a good enough writer that you want to read more, but it would have been nice to have had that "more" right here."
08/01/2009
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The Spectator
Lucy Simon
"Scudamore’s world pulsates with life. So many sounds and images are conjured up that at times one feels saturated with it all: ‘the noise, the lack of space, the sweet, garbage smells of rotting banana skins and spoiling chicken’. The pacy and disrupted narrative mimics the chaotic, claustro- phobic world of Sao Paolo itself — a city which covers a huge area, with no nucleus, making it hard to navigate. The juxtaposition of the sordid, mundane existence of those on the street with the bizarre, almost mythic lives of the super-rich, largely spent in their helicopters high above the urban sprawl, makes for vivid, uncomfortable reading."
29/12/2008
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