Winner of the 2023 Jabuti Prize in the Brazilian Book Published Abroad category
Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize
Federico and Lourenço are brothers. Their father is black, a famed forensic pathologist for the police; their mother is white. Federico – distant, angry, analytical – has light skin, which means he’s always been able to avoid the worst of the racism that Brazilian culture has to offer. He can ‘pass’ as white, and yet, because of this, he has devoted his life to racial justice. Lourenço, on the other hand, is dark-skinned, easy-going, and well-liked in the brothers’ hometown of Porto Alegre – and has become a father himself.
As Federico’s fiftieth birthday looms, he joins a governmental committee in the capital. It is tasked with quelling the increasingly violent student protests rocking Brazil by overseeing the design of a software program that will adjudicate the degree to which each university applicant is sufficiently black to warrant admittance under new affirmative-action quotas. Before he can come to grips with his feelings about this initiative, not to mention a budding romance with one of his committee colleagues, Federico is called home: his niece has just been arrested at a protest carrying a concealed gun. And not just any gun. A stolen police service revolver that Federico and Lourenço hid for a friend decades before. A gun used in a killing.
Paulo Scott here probes the old wounds of race in Brazil, and in particular the loss of a black identity independent from the history of slavery. Exploratory rather than didactic, a story of crime, street-life and regret as much as a satirical novel of ideas, Phenotypes is a seething masterpiece of rage and reconciliation.
About the Author :
Paulo Scott was born in 1966 in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil. At university, he was an active member of the student political movement and was also involved in Brazil’s re-democratisation process. For ten years he taught law at university in Porto Alegre; he has now published five books of fiction and four of poetry, and is also a translator from English. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 2008 to focus on writing full-time. Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with some sixty-something books to his name. His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, and he has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among others.
Review :
‘Scott seems to have managed to produce a novel that will survive the test of time, a profound interpretation of our time and our country.’ Folha de São Paulo
Praise for Paulo Scott
‘A powerful, complex and very ambitious voice. In the contemporary Latin American literature scene, Paulo Scott is a must-read.’ Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘Paulo Scott is one of the best novelists of his generation and is going to surprise us in the future.’João Gilberto Noll, interviewed by Posfácio magazine
‘Scott pours out his indictment of Brazil in long, overflowing sentences that are equal parts outrage and cutting humor. Originally titled Brown and Yellow when it was published in Portuguese…it is not easy to shake off.’ Kirkus Review
‘[A] profound story of colorism and familial loyalty set in Brazil…The multiple layers combine for a mesmerizing and mature story.’ Publishers Weekly starred review
‘Phenotypes is a complex, stream-of-consciousness novel about race, culture, and deciding for oneself where one belongs.’ Foreword Reviews
‘Phenotypes is…brilliant and emotionally resonant. I put it down days ago, and I'm still walking around with it.’ Star Tribune
‘A blistering examination of Brazil's fraught racial history told through two brothers, one light-skinned and one dark-skinned.’ Katie Goh, i-D (Books to Read 2022)
‘A compelling exploration of the fraught reality of race relations in Brazil . . . there is much that English-speaking readers stand to gain from the considered, quiet fury of Paulo Scott’s novel, not least the expansion of and challenge to modern-day discourses on race.’ Laura Garmeson, Times Literary Supplement
‘Phenotypes underscores how difficult antiracist projects can be at any scale…Scott’s characters quickly abandon the possibility of a comprehensive solution in favor of stopgap measures that may or may not work. Such are the inadequacies, the novel asserts, of treating entrenched and systemic issues as if they are only skin-deep.’ New York Times Book Review
‘An artfully plotted tale about race, privilege and guilt . . . careful reading proves richly rewarding.’ Lucy Popescu, The Observer
‘Phenotypes demonstrates how the traumas of growing up in a racist society can propel a person of color forward while never letting them escape their past.’
‘[Phenotypes’] deftly engaging plot . . . twists and turns while exploring race, brotherhood, privilege, and the lasting impact of guilt. Hahn’s translation is exemplary, and although this is not an easy read, it is a journey worth taking.’
‘Phenotypes is innovative, deftly precise in its form, and utterly profound in its content. Scott’s work in bringing contemporary urgencies into fiction is uncomfortable and often unsettling, but necessary—and, ultimately, unforgettable.’
'A searing indictment of racism and privilege in Brazil, and an uncompromising challenge to the country's idealised view of itself as a racial democracy.' Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times
