Another Amazon 

The Brothers (Dois Irmãos), written by the Amazonian novelist Milton Hatoum, tells of the conflicts between two deeply different twin brothers in a family of Lebanese immigrants to the Brazilian city of Manaus. A dramatic portrait of a region that is routinely defined in biological, economic, and ethnographic terms, the story happens in a growing metropolis which has ties with both the surrounding river and forest.

There are, to be sure, plenty of other realistic fictions about the Amazon. Hatoum's novel is, however, quite different from these other works in a number of ways. First, the book is one of a very small number of works by authors born in the Amazon that have obtained national and international recognition. The only real comparison in this regard is the work of Márcio Souza, also from Manaus, author of Mad Maria. Then too, in its focus not upon the forest but on the city, the novel stands apart from the great majority of other literary portraits of the region. 

In this novel Manaus is not shown as a remote jungle village, but as a today's industrial metropolis of 1.5 million persons. Although indigenous people do appear in its pages, they live together with recent arriving immigrants from various other corners of the world. The central place of Manaus in the novel effectively emphasizes the urban reality of today's Amazon—a region of some 23 million people, over half of whom now live in big and little cities.

Disponível em: <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/10.4/forum.html> (Adapted) Acesso em: 15 jun. 2006.

Select the CORRECT proposition(s) according to the information in the text.

01. Milton Hatoum belongs to a family of Lebanese writers.

02. The story focuses on the biological aspects of the Amazon.

04. The city described in the novel is different from the reality.

08. Some of the characters in the novel are indigenous people.

16. The novel’s immigrants come from many different countries.

32. Approximately twenty-three million people live in the Amazon today