"Welcome to São Paulo, Brazil, in the not too distant future. Water is scarce, garbage clogs the city, movement is restricted, and the System—sinister, omnipotent, secret—rules its subjects' every moment and thought. Here, Souza (the name is as common in Portuguese as Smith is in English) is a kind of Brazilian Everyman, struggling to preserve his integrity and hope in the face of tyranny.
In a strikingly Brazilian way, Mr. Brandao has written a cautionary anti-Utopian novel in the tradition of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We or George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Virtually all the phenomena Mr. Brandao describes have some real-life counterparts in the Brazil ruled by the military from 1964 until 1985. Despite the very Brazilian flavor of Mr. Brandao's writing and concerns, though, And Still the Earth makes compelling reading for foreigners. The conditions he describes and the grim future he foresees for his city may also await Lagos, Calcutta, Shanghai and Mexico City. And Still the Earth stands with Loyola Brandão's Zero as one of the author's greatest, and darkest, achievements. Yet Mr. Brandao is an optimist. His title, after all, recalls Galileo's response to his inquisitors after they forced him to recant his proof that the earth revolves around the sun: 'E pur si muove' - 'and still it moves.' At novel's end, the human spirit cannot be destroyed or dominated."