The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

A Cup of Rage
by Raduan Nassar
translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler
Brazil


Available in the U.K. and, on Kindle, in the U.S. from Penguin Modern Classics

A pair of lovers — a young female journalist and an older man who owns an isolated farm in the Brazilian outback — spend the night together. The next day they proceed to destroy each other. Amid vitriolic insults, cruelty and warring egos, their sexual adventure turns into a savage power game. This intense, erotic cult novel by one of Brazil’s most infamous modernist writers explores alienation, the desire to dominate and the wish to be dominated.

A Cup of Rage is a burning coal of a work, superbly translated by Stefan Tobler. You may consider a book this short to be scarcely worthy of the name, but it packs more power into its scant 47 pages than most books do into five or 10 times as many. Each of its seven chapters comes not only as an unbroken paragraph but as a single sentence: you have to read carefully to keep track, and once you have finished you will want to read it again. The writing is chewy — dense, tough, but well worth the effort.
~Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian

While reading, and marveling at, that novel and novella — both of them set on farms in the Brazilian outback, both of them stylistically bold achievements — we are struck by two other feelings: disappointment that Nassar wrote so little, and disbelief that it took so long to render his unique voice into English.
~Malcom Forbes in The National (also reviewing Nassar’s Acient Tillage)

"But all this discursive aggression was verging exhaustively on the monotonous."

as the narrator says, neatly summing up the book for me.

Suspect this is the book that may most split opinions. I've seen rave reviews from Goodreaders, journalists and bloggers whose opinions I respect, but I found it tedious in the extreme.

I just read your longer review, and I'm curious to see where I stand. Hoping to get a copy soon so I can discuss!