Brazil.

UPDIKE, John.

$300.00

Item Number: 142734

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

First edition of Updike’s sixteenth novel, a retelling of the ancient tale of Tristan and Isolde. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Erica Jong a romp in the Mato Grosso warm regards, John U.” The recipient, Erica Jong remains best known for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying which became famously controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. Written in the first person and narrated by its protagonist, 29-year-old American poet Isadora Wing, Fear of Flying was written in the throes of the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s and encapsulated the movement’s redefinition of female sexuality. In interviews, Jong stated: “At the time I wrote Fear of Flying, there was not a book that said women are romantic, women are intellectual, women are sexual—and brought all those things together… What [Isadora is] looking for is how to be a whole human being, a body and a mind, and that is what women were newly aware they needed in 1973.” The novel remains a feminist classic and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Updike wrote a glowing review of Fear of Flying with the title “Jong Love: Erica Jong’s Fearless First Novel” published in the December 17, 1973 issue of The New Yorker. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson.

John Updike's sixteenth novel takes place in a stylized Brazil where almost anything is possible, if you are young and in love. Tristão Raposo, a nineteen-year-old black child of the Rio de Janeiro slums, spies Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, across the hot sands of Copacabana Beach, and presents her with a ring stolen from an American tourist. Their flight into marriage takes them from urban banality to the farthest reaches of Brazil’s wild west, where magic still rules. Spanning twenty-two years from the mid-sixties to the late Eighties, Brazil surprises and embraces the reader with its celebration of passion, loyalty, and New World Innocence.