Entertaining enough book, with tales of adventure, death, erudition and sex that take place in modern-day Brazil. The stories are interspersed with entries from what appears to be an old biography of a Jesuit priest.

Normally I go in for the Borges/Eco type of thing but I have to admit in this case it didn't fully click for me. Maybe I just missed something or didn't fully appreciate the end. While some absurdity is par for the course, I feel that the last-minute attempt to tie all the ends together felt like it came up a bit short.

Additionally, while the characters were fairly well drawn, there was little development, and the characters as they were seemed very stereotypical to me. The female characters in particular, although they got their fair share of the spotlight, seemed constantly sexualized and/or objectified. Loredana was probably the only female character that seemed to have a little more depth. I enjoyed her parts and wish she had been given a bit more time in the book.

Overall it was a quick read and a good airplane book, but I'm not sure I would have read all 800+ pages if I had known exactly what to expect.