Reviews - La couleur sous la peau

71 reviews for:

La couleur sous la peau

Paulo Scott

3.71 AVERAGE

bhagestedt's review against another edition

3.5

challenging dark reflective tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

stevie's review against another edition

3.75

challenging reflective slow-paced

emiadelaide's review against another edition

3.75

challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

annrhub's review against another edition

3.75

challenging dark tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

eccles's review against another edition

4.25

dark emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

My comments here are offered only as a reminder to myself, as I am entirely ignorant about Brazil and what I took from this book probably says more about my predicable little world view than it does about this work. I found this a strangely optimistic story set in a complex and alien sociopolitical order, permeated with a constant sense of threat. Seen from the inside however, this small slice of Brazil doesn’t seem to have lost hope; our narrator tells a story that threads its between poverty and the police, past the brutal military, through a society of byzantine colourism, holding a mirror up to the inequity and violence but leaving us with a sense of a story that’s not over, in which things can change and there are people willing to try to change them. The first-person narration is fast and uninflected, with conversation and internal observation woven together in dense multi-page paragraphs, dotted with only the occasional “said” and “replied” to signpost the reader. This kind of prose demands close reading, which I found involved me more deeply than I’d expect to be in the Kafkaesque commission discussions about a computer program to “scientifically” determine racial identity. The narrative periodically segues back into the narrator’s personal history, asides that have the same flat, fast style, a style which in these moments mirror his peculiar sense alienation in his childhood neighbourhood, due largely, I suppose, to his skin colour and his father’s job. I was left with the sense of a whole society that survives deprivation, uncertainty and the constant threat of horrific violence thorough a kind of disassociation, a sort of permanent of rupture between internal identity and external representation that perhaps gives space for “scientific” notions like phenotype and computer programs to fit people to taxonomies, innovations that both deny the local lived experience of individuals and communities and contribute to the continuing socio-political dysfunction that, on the basis of this story, is Brazil. Again, all this from a completely naive reader, for whom Brazil could be a distant planet, and who’s probably got it all wrong. But I really appreciated the opportunity to see something of this world.