I bought this book on spec because I like to explore new writers (Mussa is Brazilian), because I have an interest in South American writers, and because I find the Europa Editions are generally pretty interesting. The book won a Brazilian national prize for Best Novel, but it is does stretch the definition of "novel".

There is a mystery: a powerful political operative is murdered in an upscale brothel. The prostitute who was with him disappears but there are questions as to whether she could have actually committed the murder. Beata, the foremost forensic expert on the police force and expert on the new science of fingerprinting, and frequenter of the brothel, with and without his wife, is assigned to the case which soon takes a personal angle that Beata could never have forseen. The style is third person narrative, but Mussa often stops and addresses the reader directly to discuss or dissect the current state of the plot.

But this is more than a mystery. This is a book that encompasses history, myth, fantasy, anthropology, psychology, criminology, geography, sociology, sorcery and black magic-- all woven through the interlocking histories of natives, colonists, and slaves through centuries in the development of Rio as a city.

At times, Mussa is deliberately didactic; and other times he weaves historical events into the pattern of his story. Through it all, across the centuries, the connecting threads are sex, sexual acts, sexual desires, sexual attraction, and sexual relationships that determine relationships and sometimes the practices of society and for which people love and lose and sometimes kill.

There is a twist that I can't reveal without spoiling the end of the story. Suffice to say that if there is a an overarching theme, it is that for a man to be a truly great lover, he must think and feel like a woman. As one character puts it: "If pleasure could be divided into a thousand parts, nine hundred and ninety-nine of them would belong to women".

A fun read.