All Dogs are Blue

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All Dogs are Blue is a comic modernist novel about being messed up — and then being messed up even more by numbing doses of pharmaceuticals. Rodrigo de Souza Leão is very clear about what has happened to his thirty-six-year-old narrator. He has swallowed ‘a chip’, and the chip makes him do things he doesn’t want to do. Set in a mental asylum in Rio de Janeiro, Souza Leão’s autobiographical last novel is about a whole lot of other things too: the drunken street sweepers from the favelas who somehow also end up in the asylum; the narrator’s teenage years growing up bookish and paranoid; his kindly parents who are pushed to the limits of their empathy and endurance; a blue toy dog which is both childhood companion and the colour of the narrator’s medication. It may also refer to the better-known black dog of melancholia — but your everyday black dog is just a mutt, whereas Souza Leão’s blue dog is a rare breed.

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