Paulo Scott – Phenotypes

Description

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022

Federico and Lourenco are brothers. Their father is black, a famed forensic pathologist for the police; their mother is white. Federico – distant, angry, analytical – has light skin, which means he’s always been able to avoid the worst of the racism that Brazilian culture has to offer. He can ‘pass’ as white, and yet, because of this, he has devoted his life to racial justice. Lourenco, on the other hand, is dark-skinned, easy-going, 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 governmental committee in the capital. It is tasked with quelling the increasingly violent student protests rocking Brazil by overseeing the design of a software program that will adjudicate the degree to which each university applicant is sufficiently black to warrant admittance under new affirmative-action quotas. Before he can come to grips with his feelings about this initiative, not to mention a budding romance with one of his committee colleagues, Federico is called home: his niece has just been arrested at a protest carrying a concealed gun. And not just any gun. A stolen police service revolver that Federico and Lourenco hid for a friend decades before. A gun used in a killing.

Paulo Scott here probes the old wounds of race in Brazil, and in particular the loss of a black identity independent from the history of slavery. Exploratory rather than didactic, a story of crime, street-life and regret as much as a satirical novel of ideas, Phenotypes is a seething masterpiece of rage and reconciliation.

‘An artfully plotted tale about race, privilege and guilt… careful reading proves richly rewarding’ Lucy Poescu, The Observer

‘Phenotypes underscores how difficult antiracist projects can be at any scale…Scott’s characters quickly abandon the possibility of a comprehensive solution in favor of stopgap measures that may or may not work. Such are the inadequacies, the novel asserts, of treating entrenched and systemic issues as if they are only skin-deep.’ The New York Times Book Review

‘A compelling exploration of the fraught reality of race relations in Brazil … there is much that English-speaking readers stand to gain from the considered, quiet fury of Paulo Scott’s novel, not least the expansion of and challenge to modern-day discourses on race.’ Laura Garmeson, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Paulo Scott has published four books of fiction and four of poetry. He also translates from English. Scott was born in 1966 in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, and grew up in a working-class neighbourhood. At university, he was an active member of the student political movement and was also involved in Brazil’s re-democratisation process. For ten years he taught law at university in Porto Alegre. Scott moved to Rio de Janeiro in 2008 to focus on writing full-time.