{"id":5235,"date":"2014-06-26T11:20:51","date_gmt":"2014-06-26T11:20:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5235"},"modified":"2014-06-30T11:12:57","modified_gmt":"2014-06-30T11:12:57","slug":"the-book-of-rio-a-city-in-short-fiction-edited-by-toni-marques-and-katie-slade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5235","title":{"rendered":"The Book of Rio \u2013 a City in Short Fiction edited by Toni Marques and Katie Slade"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/em>\"\"<\/a>Published by Comma Press 4 June 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

paperback, \u00a39.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Zo\u00eb Fairbairns<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Football on television is usually a signal for me to go and wash my hair, but during this year\u2019s World Cup I\u2019ve had other distractions: a collection of short stories about things that go on in Rio de Janeiro that don\u2019t involve 22 grown men trying to kick a ball into a net.<\/p>\n

Stories in The Book of Rio<\/em> pulsate with music and sex, ache with fatigue and yearning, flicker with the occult, crackle with danger. In \u2018I Love You\u2019 by Patricia Melo, a female student working as an escort is much more interested in texting her friends who have gone clubbing without her than in paying attention to her client, who has his own plans for what he wants her to do for him this evening. \u00a0In \u2018Strangers\u2019 by Sergio Sant\u2019Anna, two flat-hunters \u2013 a man and a woman who don\u2019t know each other \u2013 arrive simultaneously to view what seems like a desirable property, but which turns out to be riddled with bullet holes following a recent gunfight in the nearby favela. <\/em>In \u2018The Biggest Bridge in the World\u2019 by Domingos Pellegrini, workers under pressure to get the eponymous bridge built on time, keep themselves awake by tipping buckets of cold water over themselves \u2013 not such a good idea if, like the story\u2019s narrator, you are an electrician.<\/p>\n

The electrician muses on why the bridge needs to be built at all – \u2018At night I\u2019d look at Rio and then at Niteroi and I kept asking why do the people over there need to come over here, and why do the ones over here need to go over there?\u2019 Different versions of the same question recur in other stories as characters in this restless city yearn to be anywhere other than where they are now. In \u2018Spare Me, Copacabana!\u2019 by Cesar Cardoso, the overdressed, self-dramatizing narrator waits impatiently to be escorted to a fashionable nightclub, only to discover that it has burnt down. In \u2018Places, in the Middle of Everything\u2019 by Elvira Vigna, a couple for whom Rio is their home city nevertheless seek out hotels for sex because they \u2018fancied a change of bed\u2019. In \u2018The Woman Who Slept with a Horse\u2019 by Joao Ximenes Braga, a woman with a successful career but no lover \u2018wanted to be everywhere because she never wanted to be anywhere. She especially did not want to be at home.\u2019<\/p>\n

Another kind of disorientation awaits the reader who, never having been to Rio, tries to make use of the maps which interleave the stories, to locate them. Of course it is not the job of a book of stories to be a tour guide, and Toni Marques\u2019s introduction provides a few clues about the geography of the city and the book\u2019s fictional events. But the maps are so faintly printed and so lacking in the sort of information that you would expect \u2013 street names, landmarks, indicators of direction \u2013 that sometimes you feel that, like some of the lost souls in these fine stories, you could be anywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Zo\u00eb Fairbairns<\/p>\n

Stories in The Book of Rio<\/em> pulsate with music and sex, ache with fatigue and yearning, flicker with the occult, crackle with danger. In \u2018I Love You\u2019 by Patricia Melo, a female student working as an escort is much more interested in texting her friends who have gone clubbing without her than in paying attention to her client, who has his own plans for what he wants her to do for him this evening […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5235"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5244,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5235\/revisions\/5244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}