Feast Days

Author/Guide: Ian MacKenzie

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Americans abroad

ISBN: B07C29BXNZ
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

So. We were Americans abroad. We weren’t the doomed travellers in a Paul Bowles novel, and we weren’t the idealists or the malarial, religion-damaged burnouts in something by Greene; but we were people far from home nevertheless. Our naivety didn’t have political consequences. We had G.P.S. in our smartphones. I don’t think we were alcoholics. Our passports were in the same drawer as our collection of international adapters, none of which seemed to fit in Brazilian wall sockets. My husband was in the chrysalis stage of becoming a rich man, and idealism was never my vice.

I was ancillary – a word that comes from the Latin for ‘having the status of a female slave’. That’s the sort of thing I know, and it tells you something about how I misspent my education. The term among expats for people like me was ‘trailing spouse’ . . .

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Travel Guide

Travel around Sao Paul BookTrail style with Feast Days

There are plenty of snapshots of expat life throughout this novel. A wife has followed her husband who works in banking to the city and she’s finding it hard to find her feet. This is a very noisy city and it’s hard to settle for an expat apparently. Teaching English is always an option and she attends a church in order to meet other people.

There are observations of life here as an expat throughout – the novel reads like a diary or snippets in parts. One event sees them getting mugged. Then we hear of how this is something which happens in the city and you do have to take care.

São Paulo plays a major role in the novel. There’s a lot of nice detail such as how the signals to cross the road are not people but silhouettes of the buiding they are outside of. Nice deetails like this pepper the plot making it very hard to take the city out of the storylines themselves.

There are many observations of street life and everyday life here. Everything reads as very authentic. Everything is in this novel – a boiling pot of a city with many ingredients.