All Dogs are Blue

All Dogs are Blue is a fiery and scurrilously funny tale of life in a Rio de Janeiro insane asylum. Our narrator is upset by his ever-widening girth and kept awake by the Rio funk blaring from a nearby favela - fair enough, but what about the undercover agents infil- trating the asylum? He misses the toy dog of his child- hood, keeps high literary company with Rimbaud (a mischief-maker) and Baudelaire (a bit too serious for him), and finds himself the leader of a popular cult. All Dogs are Blue burst onto the Brazilian literary scene in 2008. Its raw style and comic inventiveness took readers by storm. But it was to be Rodrigo de Souza Leao’s last masterpiece. He died that year, aged 43, in a psychiatric clinic.