Book description
In the tradition of such great Latin American magic realists as Jorge
Amada, Sergio Kokis recreates the magic world of a child in Brazil.
The novel is told from the point of view of a Brazilian painter in
exile somewhere in the northern climes - man who longs for the warmth
and vibrancy of his childhood.
But his childhood and adolescence were not easy. Torn between a
deeply religious (and superstitious) mother and his father, a man of
science and reason, the young man survives his home life, life at
boarding school, and life abroad to become an artist and a person in
his own right.
Funhouse (Le pavillon des miroirs in French) has won four
major literary awards in Quebec: Grand Prix du livre de Montrl, Prix
de L'Acadie des lettres du Quec, Prix Quec-Paris, and Prix Desjardins.
"[A] dispairing picture of Brazilian urban and rural proverty
[that] is convincing and heartbreaking."
Sergio Kokis is the
author of eight novels. His first, Le pavillon des miroirs
(translated as Funhouse) won four major literary prizes in 1994.
L'art du maquillage (translated here as The Art of Deception)
appeared in 1997.
W. Donald Wilson was born in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, in
1938. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Trinity
College, Dublin, and has taught at universities in the West Indies and
England, and Canada. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.
