Ranked alongside leading Latin American writers like Cesar Aira and Mario Bellatin - and deeply influenced by Clarice Lispector - Joao Gilberto Noll is esteemed as one of Brazil's living legends. Quiet Creature on the Corner marks Noll's U.S. debut. An unemployed poet finds himself thrown in jail after inexplicably raping his neighbor, but his time in the slammer is mysteriously cut short when he's abruptly taken to a new home - a countryside manor where his every need is seen to. All that's required of him is to...write poetry. Just who are his captors, Kurt and Otavio? What of the alluring maid, Amalia, and her charge, a woman with cancer named Gerda? And, most alarmingly of all, why does Kurt suddenly appear to be aging so much faster than he should? Reminiscent of the films of David Lynch, and written in Noll's distinctive postmodern style - a strange world of surfaces seemingly without rational cause and effect - Quiet Creature on the Corner is a bizarre existential mystery with deep implications. Written during Brazil's transition from military dictatorship to democracy - and capturing the disjointed feel of that rapidly changing world - Quiet Creature is mysterious and abrupt, pivoting on choices that feel both arbitrary and inevitable. Like Kazuo Ishiguro, Noll takes us deep into the mind of a person who's always missing a few crucial pieces of information. Is he moving toward an answer, or is he just as lost as ever?
