South america

There’s the pretty-much-mandatory South American setting, the gloomy reflections on the nature of reality and unreality, along with a clutch of wildly unreliable narrators. There’s the pretty-much-mandatory South American setting, the gloomy reflections on the nature of reality and unreality, along with a clutch of wildly unreliable narrators. It even has the added cachet of having been written in Spanish by a Canadian and then translated into English. If ever there was a book that demanded to be hurled across the room by anyone who’s not a regular user of the word ‘ludic’, this surely is it. It therefore comes as a considerable surprise to report that All Men Are

James Scudamore is evidently fascin- ated by borderline personality disorder. His characters veer between moments of machismo-fuelled rage, extravagant eloquence and intense introspection. The Amnesia Clinic (2007), which earned him the Somerset Maugham Award for writers under 35, was set in Ecuador and depicted the tribulations of adolescence. For his second, bolder novel, he crosses the Andes to the even more turbulent setting of Brazil and heaving, torrid Sao Paolo. There are striking similarities between the books — among them a passion for the South American landscape and the quest for personal identity — but the naive charm of The Amnesia Clinic is here replaced by a more brutal force.