Early Mourning
By Brazilian writer Edla van SteenTranslated by David S. George
ISBN: 0-935480-84-6
Price: $14.00
Pages: 144
"Spanning 12 hours in September, from dusk till dawn, and set in Brazil's São Paolo, this cinematic novel tracks a gang's robbery at a funeral home... Early Mourning jumps among multiple plots, features a cast of eccentric characters--most memorably a female transvestite who moonlights as a professional mouner--and black humor.... The racy prose, briskly translated by David S. George, is in the present tense, adding to the headlong rush of events."
--Washington Post Book World
"Winner of the Brazilian Academy of Letters prize for best novel and the Pen Club of Brazil for best book in 1993, this work gives 'snapshot' style background stories of several people who end up in the same funeral parlor one night in São Paolo. Van Steen... presents the stories of diverse, colorful characters from many levels of society in alternating chapters in a very concise way that leads the reader to feel that this was written to become a movie. The pace is fast, and van Steen shows how many current social problems in Brazil affect her characters' lives. For all Latin American collections."
--Library Journal
"A prizewinning Brazilian novel, whose author... fashions a multileveled portrayal of São Paolo society.... An amazing amount of life is packed into comparatively few pages in this swiftly paced, dizzyingly amusing novel. It's just the sort of book you hope will become a movie."
--Kirkus Reviews
Other English translations of Edla van Steen include: A Bag of Stories (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1991).