Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos

Again a Rubem Fonseca book – my favorite writer from Brazil. Beside of being a very entertaining book – disguised as thriller, I have to praise the title itself as well: Vast Emotions & Incomplete Thoughts. Isn’t that perfect? The plot seems trivial, but there are dreams and personal catastrophes woven in. The simple-thriller plot is as follows: a film director gets by chance soma valuable gems in his possession, and in turn people around him get assassinated. At the same time he gets an offer to make a movie in Germany. A nice opportunity to escape the nightmare to be also murdered. He takes it, and a mayor part of the novel takes place in Berlin before the fall of the wall. The Berlin of the secret services, spies, counter-agents and dark deals. You can imagine that he has to meet some kind of Russian “evil”. The Berlin story features a love story as well, which finally does not really unfold due to the tense air or betrayal and mistrust. On top of all that you will be introduced to the work of Isaac Babel – a Russian writer and journalist in the Stalin era, which managed to write perfectly condensed sentences – to say everything in the shortest and simplest sentence possible. I will definitely read some of Babel’s stories. Babel was murdered by Stalin as so many intellectuals.
The whole story is tense, entertaining, and funny until the last page. I never regret reading Fonseca.