Luis Fernando Verissimo

Luís Fernando Veríssimo in 2003. Photo produced by Agência Brasil.

A best-selling Brazilian writer, Luis Fernando Verissimo (26 September 1936 - )is little-known abroad. He rose to fame in the 1970s, mastering a genre named "Chronicle": weekly or daily columns in a newspaper, ranging between humorous political commentary and witty short stories about daily urban life.

Since then, he has published 40 books of short stories and newspaper columns, 7 novels and 15 comic books. In the meantime, he also plays the saxophone in Jazz 6, a sextet of five players. His father Erico is a noted writer.

Recurring characters:

• The analyst from Bagé - a Gaucho Freudian analyst. Enough said, if you know what a Gaucho is.
• The old lady from Taubaté - during the very unpopular terms of presidents General Figueiredo, José Sarney (1980's) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1990's), an old lady from the small city of Taubaté would become famous as "the last who still believes in what the government says". She was Killed Off for Real in 2005, when the government's mess was big enough to frustrate her!
• Ed Mort - a satire on noir detective stories, set on Rio de Janeiro.

Luis Fernando Verissimo provides examples of the following tropes:

In his short stories there are examples of:

• Arc Number: every single time he needs a random number, he uses either 17 or 117. Every. Single. Time. It was even discussed in a newspaper column of his, in the late 1990's.
• Author Appeal: Talking about his soccer team Internacional or his favoured political party, PT.
• Fan Nickname: During Fernando Henrique Cardoso's tenure as Brazilian president, Verissimo always called him "Efe agá" ("Eff ache").
• Running Gag: a lot, really, a lot, thanks to the newspaper-column thing.

In his novels there are examples of:

• In the detective novel "Borges And The Eternal Orangutans", the Unreliable Narrator is the single eye witness to a highly symbolism-heavy crime scene that is quickly messed up. The body is was a V position, close to a mirror, making a sign, but he can't remember exactly what was the sign it formed (and somehow this is significant for solving the crime). The chapters are properly named X, O, W, M and <>.
• Meaningful Name: In the same novel, there's a detective whose name is Cuervo (spanish for crow), who's also a specialist in Poe's work. A friend of his (Borges) jokes that Cuervo has the "privileged point of view of an insider".