Synopsis "Phenotypes"
Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize A smart and stylish account of the bigotry lurkingin our hearts and institutions alike Federico and Lourenço are brothers. Their father is black, a famedforensic pathologist for the police; their mother is white. Federico--distant, angry, analytical--has light skin, which means he's always been able to avoidthe worst of the racism 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, easygoing, 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 ludicrous yetchilling governmental committee in the capital. It is tasked with quelling theincreasingly violent student protests rocking Brazil by overseeing the designof new piece of software that will remove the question of race from the handsof fallible, human, prejudiced college administrators by adjudicating who doesand doesn't warrant admittance as a non-white applicant under newaffirmative-action quotas. Before he can come to grips with his feelings aboutthis initiative, not to mention a budding romance with one of his committeecolleagues, Federico is called home: his niece has just been arrested at aprotest carrying a concealed gun. And not just any gun. A stolen police servicerevolver that he and Lourenço hid for afriend decades before. A gun used in a killing. Paulo Scott here probes the old wounds of race in Brazil, and inparticular the loss of a black identity independent from the history of slavery.Exploratory rather than didactic, a story of crime, street-life and regret asmuch as a satirical novel of ideas, Phenotypes is a seething masterpieceof rage and reconciliation.
