Macunaíma

Reviews

"Macunaíma is a miracle. There’s nothing like it in all of literature. Katrina Dodson is a hero." — Mario Bellatin

"An explosion of language… The obvious comparison for English speakers would be Ulysses, as an encyclopedia of styles, of language forms." — Fredric Jameson

"We are so fortunate that Mário de Andrade’s rollicking Macunaíma is finally reappearing in English in Katrina Dodson’s dazzling translation." — John Keene

"Macunaíma is above all a vision of mythical Brazilian consciousness, a picaresque epic of birth, triumph, decline and death." — The New York Times

"Mário wrote our Odyssey and, with a swing of his native club, created our classical hero and the national poetic idiom for the next fifty years." — Oswald de Andrade

"He’s an anti-hero hero, questioning and contradictory. Macunaíma is an emblem of the marvelous, metamorphosed into the errant question mark of his one-legged constellation. An anti-normative hero who points to a future, eventually more open, world." — Haroldo de Campos

"An explosion of language… The obvious comparison for English speakers would be Ulysses, as an encyclopedia of styles, of language forms." — Fredric Jameson

"Macunaíma is a self-consciously nation-founding novel that reads like a thick broth of painful historical truth, quoted myth, and irreducible pleasures. Rarely is so much pleasure given and pain revealed by overlapping languages." — Arto Lindsay

"A deliberately provocative text, slangy, comical, antiliterary, assuming all the apparent contradictions of the struggle against European seriousness in its various forms." — Pascale Casanova

"Electrifying and perplexing, this cornerstone of Brazilian literature shouldn’t be missed." — Publishers Weekly

"To describe Macunaíma as sui generis would hardly scratch the surface." — Ratik Asokan, 4Columns

"One of our sacred books, whose name we dare speak only on our knees." — César Aira

"The translation of the year for me was Katrina Dodson’s of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma, a brilliant, creative re-creation and creation and recreation, full of radical translation decisions and countless superb less radical ones too. " — Damion Searls, The Millions