Os Despojos do Dia, de Kazuo Ishiguro

I haven't read many books by Ishiguro - just A Pale View of the Hills and Never Let me Go - but liked them immensely, especially the second. His writing is extremely beautiful, in a peculiarly restrained way that makes it so much stronger. And this is another perfect example of his masterly writing (I read it in Portuguese, but I found the translation very good, one can hear the English original in some way). I watched the movie with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson many years ago, and it's an excellent adaptation, but of course the book is much more nuanced and complete. It's a sad and nostalgic story, about what could have been and the alienation of class and job sense of duty, beautiful, and that leaves us wondering about the fleetness of life.

The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood

Another good dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, not as good as the Maddadam trilogy or The Handmaid's Tale, but still very clever and with a sardonic humour. It's funny, with a sardonic humour, and it reminds us of a sci-fi B-movie from the 1950s or an episode of Black Mirror. The writing is excellent, even if sometimes it looks like the author is having too much fun lingering on the pulp details - but Margaret Atwood is too elegant to step over the borders of good taste. All in all, a very interesting book.

The Future is History - How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen

An extremely interesting book, both thought provoking and chillingly frightening. I usually like Masha Gessen's column in the New Yorker, and the book's subject always fascinated me - how, after the fall of Communist Soviet Union, Russia evolved back to the same kind of non-democratic regime it had before; besides, the analysis of the drift to authoritarianism, intolerance and democratic deficit is extremely relevant now, when we are witnessing it not only in former dictatorships but in the heart of the Western world.

The book is well structured and researched, following the lives of four young people born in the 1980s and three older intellectuals. Their lives and development are depicted along the context of the changing political and social atmosphere; the turbulent 1990s and the rise of Putin until the present undemocratic, nationalist and chauvinistic regime are chillingly clear. It's a depressing read in a way, also a kind of very timely warning. I could do with less references to psychoanalysis, which is a somewhat outdated theory, but it's a minor shortcome.

It's terribly sad to watch how countries that have been authoritarian for the most part of their existence and where for a time a window of democratic hope opened revert to authoritarianism - like Russia, Brazil, Turkey, even Hungary or Poland - but even worse is to witness the same tendency, through a rise in populism, nationalism, xenophobia and intolerance, in countries that have been democratic for a long time - like the US, Britain, France, Israel, even Sweden. It looks like madness has taken possession of the Western world, as it forgets the values that gave us the longest and most prosperous period of peace in our long History.

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There are two great things in this book: the extremely insightful and lucid portrait of racism in the US and the very interesting and informative depiction of the present state of life and aspirations for learned middle class people in an African country (in this case Nigeria) seen through the eyes of one of them. Fortunately, these compensate the book's shortcomings - the lameness of the romantic plot, a sometimes too morally righteous undertone and its length (it should be at least 200 pages shorter, and I admit that if it went on for another 100 pages I would downgrade it from 4 to 3 stars).

Chimamande Ngozi Adichie's writing is elegant and fluid, so the book is an easy read. So, even if it's too long, I still think it's worth reading, though not nearly as good as Half of a Yellow Sun, the only other of her books I read.