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Title: Lush Tragedy in the Amazon
Review: Hatoum's "The Brothers" are siblings born to a Lebanese-Brazilian family in Manaus, the largest city on the Amazon river. Twins Yaqub and Omar are each other's mortal enemies and mirror opposites. The story reeks of jungle noises, river smells, and the crowded, complicated family lives of a working class family with secrets and betrayals. Hatoum's structure -the narrator's identity is revealed only slowly, and the narrator himself evolves just as the family and the city itself- is successful. The prose never rises off the page, perhaps a function of the translation or Hatoum's own deliberate style, but the story is a good one. A family and a story whose birth and development bear the seeds of their own tragedy and fall.
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