The Country of Carnival - by Jorge Amado

Debut novel, written when Jorge Amado was eighteen years old, O País do Carnaval (1931) is, despite its ironic title, darker and more introspective than most of the books that made him the most popular fiction writer in Brazilian literature. The narrative begins on the ship that brings the young farmer's son Paulo Rigger back to Brazil, after seven years in Paris, where he studied law and absorbed modern behaviors and ideas. In the first days he spends in Rio de Janeiro, Rigger tries to understand a country where he no longer feels at home, a country that is timidly trying to overcome its oligarchic backwardness and enter the industrial and urban era. Back in Salvador, he joins a group of failed poets and corrupt journalists that revolve around the skeptical Pedro Titian, a veteran chronicler. Everyone feels dissatisfied and seeks a meaning for existence: in love, in money, in politics, in bourgeois life or in religion. In this generational novel, the characters' doubts and anxieties mirror the situation of the country, which at that time was going through the Revolution of 1930 and was trying to redefine its direction.