‎UPDIKE JOHN‎
‎BRAZIL‎

‎Historia da America portugueza, desde o anno de mil e quinhentos do seu descobrimento, atá o de mil e setecentos e vinte e quatro. - [THE FIRST GENERAL HISTORY OF BRAZIL]‎

‎Lisboa Occidental, na Officina de Joseph Antonio da Sylva, 1730. Folio (29 x 195 mm). In recent green half calf with five raised bands and gilt lettering and ornamentation to spine. Title-page mounted and with repair to outer margin, no loss of text. Last leaf with repair to lower outer corner, also with no loss of text. First and least few leaves with brownspotting. Very light browning in margins throughout. Title printed in red and black, woodcut initials and head-pieces. A fine and clean copy. (14), 716 pp. (Here with the often missing half title, but wanting the final blank).‎

‎Rare first edition, here with the often missing half title, of the first general history of Brazil – “This work is extremely copious in the details of its foundation as a colony, its successive governors, its churches, its monasteries and convents” (Sabin). ""This first edition is becoming rare, and is much sought after by Brazilians [...] since it is the first history of Brazil to have been printed, and since it was written by a Brazilian"" (Borba de Moraes). The author's purpose was to narrate the events that had taken place in Brazil with the help of ""truthful reports"", these largely from Jesuit sources, and ""modern information"" given by those who had traveled in the vast Brazilian territory. This was the only history of Brazil available to Pitta’s contemporaries, since most of the others composed in the first two centuries of colonization remained in manuscript form until the nineteenth century. Rocha Pitta was born in Bahia in 1660 and died in the year 1738. At the age of 22 he left the University of Coimbra, where he took his degree, to return to Bahia, where he got married. He made up his mind to write a history of Brazil, and he spent years in collecting documents in the Monasteries of Brazil and Portugal, where he went in order to study French, Dutch and Italian for the purposes of his history. “In 1728, after 40 years of study, he began to print his history, which appeared in 1730. It was universally well received, and King John V. appointed him a member of the household in consequence, yet in a few years the Portuguese government publicly prohibited its being read under the severest penalties.” (Sabin).Sabin 72300 Borba de Moraes (1983), p. 748‎

‎A Cidade Sitiada. Romance. [i.e. The Besieged City]. - [THE JOYCE OF BRAZIL]‎

‎Rio de Janeiro, (1949). Original brown full cloth with black lettering to spine. Wear to extremities. Internally browned. ‎

‎The rare first edition of Clarice Lispector's famous third novel, her fabulous ""The Besieged City"", which now counts as one of her greatest productions and one of the most important works of modern Brazilian literature. In spite of now being considered one of the greatest modern authors, Clarice Lispector is a fairly recent discovery for most, and many of her most famous novels have only recently been translated into English for the first time. ""Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector's third novel - the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals-is in English at last."" (From the first English translation, 2019). Clarice (1920-1977), as she is usually called by her many fans worldwide, is one of the most intriguing and revolutionizing authors of the 20th century. After having been re-discovered in Europe, she is now compared to the likes of Joyce, Kafka, and Steinbeck. She was born in Ukraine, to Jewish parents, and moved to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters following WWI. She grew up in Recife and moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. She was merely 23, when she published her first novel, ""Near to the Wild Heart"", which catapulted her into fame in her own country (Brazil). Following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, she left the country in 1944 and spent the next 15 years in Europe and the United States. She continued, however, to publish all of her writings in Brazil. Although immensely famous in Brazil, it was only after the Amrican writer Benjamin Moser published a biography of Clarice Lispector in 2009 that her works have become the object of an extensive project of retranslation, published by New Directions Publishing and Penguin Modern Classics, being the first Brazilian to enter the prestigious series. Moser characterizes Lispector as ""the most important Jewish writer in the world since Kafka"". ""The Besieged City"" was initially less well received in Brazil than her two previous publications, but is now considered one of her masterpieces, renowned for its radical ideas, novel language, mix of literary styles, and unusual subject matter. ""Written in Europe shortly after Clarice Lispector's own marriage, ""The Besieged City"" is a proving ground for the intricate language and the radical ideas that characterize one of her century's greatest writers - and an ironic ode to the magnetism of the material."" (From the first English translation, 2019). ""The legendarily beautiful Clarice Lispector, tall and blonde, clad in the outspoken sunglasses and chunky jewelry of a grande dame of midcentury Rio de Janeiro, met our current definition of glamour. She spent years as a fashion journalist and knew how to look the part. But it is as much in the older sense of the word that Clarice Lispector is glamorous: as a caster of spells, literally enchanting, her nervous ghost haunting every branch of the Brazilian arts. Her spell has grown unceasingly since her death. Then, in 1977, it would have seemed exaggerated to say she was her country's preëminent modern writer. Today, when it no longer does, questions of artistic importance are, to a certain extent, irrelevant. What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. For them, reading Clarice Lispector is one of the great emotional experiences of their lives. But her glamour is dangerous. ""Be careful with Clarice,"" a friend told a reader decades ago, using the single name by which she is universally known. ""It's not literature. It's witchcraft."" The connection between literature and witchcraft has long been an important part of the Clarice mythology. That mythology, with a powerful boost from the Internet, which magically transforms rumors into facts, has developed ramifications so baroque that it might today be called a minor branch of Brazilian literature. Circulating unstoppably online is an entire shadow oeuvre, generally trying, and failing, to sound profound, and breathing of passion. Online, too, Clarice has acquired a posthumous shadow body, as pictures of actresses portraying her are constantly reproduced in lieu of the original. If the technology has changed its forms, the mythologizing itself is nothing new. Clarice Lispector became famous when, at the end of 1943, she published ""Near to the Wild Heart."" She was a student, barely twenty-three, from a poor immigrant background. Her first novel had such a tremendous impact that, one journalist wrote, ""we have no memory of a more sensational debut, which lifted to such prominence a name that, until shortly before, had been completely unknown."" But only a few weeks after that name was becoming known she left Rio with her husband, a diplomat. They would live abroad for almost two decades. Though she made regular visits home, she would not return definitively until 1959. In that interval, legends flourished. Her odd foreign name became a subject of speculation-one critic suggested it might be a pseudonym-and others wondered whether she was, in fact, a man. Taken together, the legends reflect an uneasiness, a feeling that she was something other than she seemed....New subjects require new language. Part of Clarice's odd grammar can be traced to the powerful influence of the Jewish mysticism that her father introduced her to. But another part of its strangeness can be attributed to her need to invent a tradition. As anyone who reads her stories from beginning to end will see, they are shot through by a ceaseless linguistic searching, a grammatical instability, that prevents them from being read too quickly.... ""In painting as in music and literature,"" she wrote, ""what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye."" As abstract painters sought to portray mental and emotional states without direct representation, and modern composers expanded traditional laws of harmony, Clarice undid reflexive patterns in grammar. She often had to remind readers that her ""foreign"" speech was not the result of her European birth or an ignorance of Portuguese. Nor, needless to say, of the proper ways women presented themselves. As a professional fashion writer, she reveled in her characters' appearances. And then she dishevelled their dresses, smudged their mascara, deranged their hair, enchanting well-composed faces with the creepier glamour Sir Walter Scott described. With overturned words, she conjured an entire unknown world-conjuring, too, the unforgettable Clarice Lispector: a female Chekhov on the beaches of Guanabara."" (Benjamin Moser in The New Yorker). All of Clarice Lispector's works are scarce in the first editions - which were all printed in Rio de Janeiro - and hardly every appear on the market. ‎

‎Fausto Boris. History do Brazil. In English (ask us if in doubt)./Fausto Boris. Historia do Brazil.‎

‎Fausto Boris. History do Brazil. In English (ask us if in doubt)./Fausto Boris. Historia do Brazil. 2012 688p. SKUalb480e3f65cdecf6ba.‎

‎Frans Post: Animals in Brazil‎

‎Bruin, Alexander de: Frans Post: Animals in Brazil. Exhibition: Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 2016. 80 pages : illustrations. Paperback. Extract from 'Master Drawings' vol. 54, no. 3, 2016, serving as the catalogue to the exhibition 'Frans Post: Animals in Brazil / Dieren uit Brazilië', held at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (6 October 2016-8 january 2017).‎

‎Extract from 'Master Drawings' vol. 54, no. 3, 2016, serving as the catalogue to the exhibition 'Frans Post: Animals in Brazil / Dieren uit Brazilië', held at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (6 October 2016-8 january 2017).‎

‎Brazil from official and other Sources prepared in the international Bureau of the American Republics, Williams C. Fox, Director.‎

‎London, Edward Stanford, 1905. (95 x 95,5 cm.). A large lithographed map of Brazil, lithographed in colours, original linen-backed and folded in 35 sections. Folded in the original cloth-case with the original printed title-label preserved. A fine copy.‎