The Beautiful Empire

The Incredible Brazilian #2

by Zulfikar Ghose

Gregorio Piexoto Da Silva Xavier, a roguish adventurer, witnesses the rapid rise of rubber tree plantations in late-nineteenth-century Brazil

383 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Zulfikar Ghose (born in Sialkot, India (now Pakistan) on March 13, 1935) is a novelist, poet and essayist. A native of Pakistan who has long lived in Texas, he writes in the surrealist mode of much Latin American fiction, blending fantasy and harsh realism.

He became a close friend of British experimental writer B. S. Johnson, with whom he collaborated on several projects, and of Anthony Smith. The three writers met when they served as joint editors of an annual anthology of student poets called Universities' Poetry. Ghose also met English poet Ted Hughes and his wife, the American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, and American author Janet Burroway, with whom he occasionally collaborated.
While teaching and writing in London from 1963–1969, Ghose also free-lanced as a sports journalist, reporting on cricket for The Observer newspaper. Two collections of his poetry were published, The Loss of India (1964) and Jets From Orange (1967), along with an autobiography called Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965) and his first two novels, The Contradictions (1966) and The Murder of Aziz Khan (1969). The Contradictions explores differences between Western and Eastern attitudes and ways of life.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second novel in Ghose’s Incredible Brazilian trilogy, The Beautiful Empire chronicles the rise of Gregorio Piexoto da Silva Xavier from child soldier taking potshots at the Paraguayans, to his time as a ruthless assistant for the rubber barons plundering and exploiting the Amazon rainforest during the Victorian boom, to the proprietor of a floating brothel in the town of Manaus. Written in the manner of a Victorian epic, with the picaresque rumbustiousness of Fielding et al, Ghose’s matter-of-fact prose coolly describes the casual barbarity—the financial and sexual exploitation and brute violence against the Indian tribes—of the arrogant European colonialists, and immerses us fully in a vibrant cast of greedy grotesques and hypocrites, in a novel that is simply sumptuous and thrilling to read. There’s no earthly reason Ghose should find himself out of print in 2024. It’s truly a travesty.

[Mudasir · Rating 5 out of 5]

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