Spilt Milk

From world-renowned Brazilian writer Chico Buarque comes a stylish, imaginative tale of love, loss, and longing, played out across multiple generations of one Brazilian family. At once jubilant and painfully nostalgic, playful and devastatingly urgent, Spilt Milkcements Buarque’s reputation as a masterful storyteller.

As Eulálio Assumpção lies dying in a Brazilian public hospital, his daughter and the attending nurses are treated—whether they like it or not—to his last, rambling monologue. Ribald, hectoring, and occasionally delusional, Eulálio reflects on his past, present, and future—on his privileged, plantation-owning family, his father’s philandering with beautiful French whores, his own half-hearted career as a weapons dealer, the eventual decline of the family fortune; and his passionate courtship of the wife who would later abandon him. As Eulálio wanders the sinuous twists and turns of his own fragmented memories, Buarque conjures up a brilliantly evocative portrait of a man’s life and love, set in the broad sweep of vivid Brazilian history.

“Budapest was one of my favorite novels of 2004, and since then I’ve been waiting, with increasing impatience, for another book by Chico Buarque. I read Spilt Milk in a single night, awed and deeply moved. How did he do it? Buarque has breathed the story of a whole country into a single, unforgettable man with a soul as big as Brazil. But he’s also written one of the saddest love stories, and one of the truest.” —Nicole Krauss