Book, Lima Barreto: sad visionary[LS]

2017 APCA Award for best biography In a monumental biography of Lima Barreto, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz investigates the origins, trajectory and destiny of the writer from Rio from a racial perspective in Rio de Janeiro during the First Republic. For more than ten years, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz delved into the work of Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, with her keen eye as an anthropologist and historian, to create a biographical profile that covered the body, soul and books of the writer of Todos os Santos. This, which is the most complete biography of Lima Barreto since Francisco de Assis Barbosa's pioneering work, released in 1952, is the result of Schwarcz's passionate intimacy with the creator of Policarpo Quaresma — and a keen eye that seeks to understand the biography's trajectory from the racial issue, still little discussed in works about his life. Covering the entirety of Lima Barreto's books and press publications, as well as diaries and other personal papers, many of them unpublished, the author balances the interpretative rigor demonstrated in Brasil: A biography and The Emperor's Beards with a rare sensitivity to subtleties that temper the relationships between biographical context and literary creation. A militant writer, as he defined himself, Lima Barreto professed political and social ideas ahead of his time, with scathing criticisms of racism (which he felt in his own skin) and other chronic ills of Brazilian society. Generously illustrated with photographs, manuscripts and other original documents, Lima Barreto: Triste visionário pays an essential tribute to one of the greatest prose writers of the Portuguese language of all time, still modern almost a century after his sad end in poverty, illness and forgetfulness.