About the author and novel
Born in the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, Jacques Fux, is the winner of the 2013 São Paulo Prize for Literature (the Brazilian equivalent of the Man Booker Prize). He received degrees in mathematics and computer science, and later earned two Doctorates, one in Comparative Literature from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and another in French Language, Literature and Civilization from the University of Lille. He had previously published "Literatura e Matemática: Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec e o OULIPO" (2001), for which he received the Capes Prize for the Best Thesis in Letters and Linguistics in Brazil in 2010. Fux has produced diverse academic works while living in Israel, USA, France, and Argentina, and is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University. 

The novel, Antiterapias gives us a glimpse of the Brazilian Jewish community in the twenty-first century. It narrates the journey of a young boy from a small and conservative Jewish community, in his search for a place in contemporary Brazil. In a tone often poetic and prophetic, and sometimes vulgar and profane, the narrator describes vivid memories and lessons originating from family, love, and social relationships in high school. He narrates his life, connections, and missed connections with irony, humor, as well as well-crafted and deliberate literary plagiarism. Proust, Freud, Tolstoy, Machado de Assis and Pessoa are some of the apparitions and literary muses that trace the path for the narrator’s life.
Contact: Cinthya Torres at cetorres@fas.harvard.edu

More information available at http://misti.mit.edu/literary-reading-jacques-fux-his-novel-antiterapias

Co-sponsored by the DRCLAS Brazil Studies Program and the Portuguese section of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard.