Glory and its litany of horrors

Title:

Uniform Title:

Glória e seu cortejo de horrores. English

Author:

Torres, Fernanda, 1965- author.

Added Author:

Becker, Eric M. B.,

Personal Author:

Torres, Fernanda, 1965- author.

ISBN:

9781632061126

Edition:

First Restless books paperback edition.

Physical Description:

223 pages ; 19 cm

General Note:

"First published in Portuguese as A glória e seu cortejo de horrores by Companhia das Letras Ltda. in 2017"--Title page verso.

Abstract:

"As an actor, Mario Cardoso has everything going for him: acclaim, an elevated lifestyle, artistic achievement. His apex will be staging a production of Shakespeare's masterpiece King Lear. Everything is going brilliantly until, seeing his co-star dressed as a chicken with a diaper, he breaks down in hysterical laughter, and does so again in each subsequent performance. Mario's troubles worsen when he receives a call reporting that his mother has been found unconscious on a beach in Rio. He abandons Lear and returns to her--and enters a swirl of family drama he'd determined to leave behind. His first shot at recovering his career comes in the guise of a biblical role in an evangelical TV station's production of a soap opera: Sodoma. He has a torrid affair, finds love, and lands a deal with the country's biggest TV network for steady work in soap operas. Mario's new life brings fame and money that theater could never match--but compromises he's made in the past come snarling back to bite him, and his next stage set will be one he never anticipated. With the wicked humor and fleet-footed pace that made her novel The End a runaway bestseller in Brazil and a critical hit in the U.S., Fernanda Torres's Glory and its Litany of Horrors is a wise and funny send-up of a generation that witnessed their ideas of art fall into the hands of the market, and their ideas of the future proven to be as illusory as theater

Personal Subject:

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. King Lear-Fiction.

Subject Term:

Actors -- Brazil -- Fiction.

Life change events -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Brazil -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction.

Genre:

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Broad Rock	Book	FICTION TORRES	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Main Library	Book	FICTION TORRES	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

From Fernanda Torres, the celebrated Brazilian actress and bestselling author of The End , comes a riotous tragicomedy of a famed actor's path from national sex symbol to cult icon to raving madman after a disastrous performance as King Lear.

Mario Cardoso's meteoric rise to fame begins in the early sixties, when the promise of sex and revolution permeates the Rio air. But as he conquers the stage, arthouse cinema, and primetime TV, the fever and the decadence of stardom take their toll, and middle-aged Mario finds himself with an ebbing reputation, hairline, and bank account. He needs a royal comeback.

Enter King Lear . Mario's turn as Shakespeare's mad monarch goes well until he's overtaken by a fit of laughter that gets more demented with each performance. Forced to cancel the show, he's confronted with his mother's unstaged madness--she's now convinced that Mario is in fact her long-departed husband. Broke and desperate, Mario signs on for an evangelical network production: Sodoma . Yet, as low as he's fallen, Mario's final set is one he never imagined.

With the wicked humor and fleet-footed pace that made her novel The End a runaway bestseller in Brazil, Fernanda Torres's Glory and its Litany of Horrors is a razor-sharp take on the uneasy marriage of Art and the marketplace, and on the profession of acting in all its horror and glory.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

The career of a middle-aged Brazilian actor goes seriously off the railsand then plunges into the abyss.Bad things happen in this second novel by Brazilian actress Torres (The End, 2017), and then bad goes to worse, but the tone of the novel remains closer to farce than tragedy. Having forsaken the soap operas that made him a star, the narrator has committed himself (and his financial resources) to a touring production of King Lear while his life offstage has become more Lear-like than his performance onstage. His mother has dementia; she believes her son is her husband, and she keeps trying to seduce him. At least she talks. Her mother-in-law, the actor's grandmother, remains alive but barely lucid. And so the family members he might expect to help him care for his mother have their hands full. "I thought back to Lear's madness," he laments. "I should have studied my grandmother more closely." For his real-life predicament strikes him as closer to the madness and tragedy of Shakespeare than what he has been portraying on stage, even before he had brought the whole production crashing down on him by breaking into uncontrollable laughter at the most inopportune time. The bulk of the novel finds him reminiscing on how he has found himself at this juncture. He remembers his early days studying under a radical polemicist, when he learned that revolution preached from the stage can lead to disastrous consequences. He found his own revolutionary inspiration in Hair; it was lust that led him to acting and then to love with an older actress who found it impossible to separate her roles from her life (a recurring theme throughout the book). A series of set pieces then includes a disastrous film shoot and a biblical TV soap titled Sodom, where "ripped dancer girls weaned on iron and protein supplements shook their silicon during the Dance of the Seven Veils." He thinks he has hit his absolute bottom when he takes a toilet paper commercial in his role as Lear in his attempt to recoup his losses. But in a novel like this, things can always get worse.From an inside perspective, there really is no business like show business. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.