O dia Mastroianni
J.P. Cuenca

NOVEL | 2007 | 210 pages

O dia Mastroianni [The Mastroianni Day] is any day, at any time, or in any city around the world. It is when two friends decide to go through the hilarious ritual of spending 24 hours living, as though in a farce, like the persona that the legendary Italian actor immortalized as his own: a dandy going between women and pleasures, ironic and slightly melancholy, all noise and no fury.

This tradition has no basis in cinema or in memory, but rather in João Paulo Cuenca’s imagination: he creates an offbeat world for Pedro Cassavas and Tomás Anselmo. This double-act wanders through a city as improbable as its name, and from the roguish popcorn vendor working at Praça do Duomo to the Bohemian life of Baixo Gália, they go through the most entertaining nightmares. A world that, little by little, becomes more familiar to the reader. O dia Mastroianni is, in many ways, the novel of a generation—or, more precisely, the clichés of a generation that becomes irreversibly entwined with those same clichés they are so averse to. The characters recite quotes, boast, and expose themselves to ridicule because of their boundless pretension. The First Commandment of the best Brazilian literature is once again invoked, this time as a farce, of course: Cuenca only uses the quill of laughter because is comes soaked in the ink of melancholy.

A sample English translation can be found in Word Without Borders.

RIGHTS: portuguese (brazil) AGIR I portuguese (portugal) CAMINHO | german A1 I italian CAVALLO DI FERRO | spanish (venezuela, colombia, chile) LIBROS DEL FUEGO

“O Dia Mastroianni, João Paulo Cuenca’s most recent publication, is one of those books ... to be read in one go, in a single night in one greedy gulp.”
— O Grito
“Light-hearted, funny and absurdly acerbic. One of the best books of the last decade.”
— Estado de S.Paulo
“Once you have entered into the spirit of the novel, it is entertaining like few others.”
— Isabel Coutinho, Ípsilon
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