At this time of year, when panettone dominates supermarket shelves, it’s already safe to say: Michel Alcoforado’s “Coisa de rico” is one of the books of the year. The Brazilian anthropologist’s more than a decade’s research on the lives and customs of wealthy people in Brazil has sold more than 40,000 copies. For the national market, there are many. Alcoforado became a media personality who performed an autopsy Joy of life From the top of the pyramid. But the measure of its success is that the book has become part of the conversation circles: wherever it reaches, someone is reading “Coisa de rico.”
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The author maps some of the bragging rights of the country’s wealthy: children in a bilingual school, extreme thinness, international travel, and VIP lounges at airports, if not the planes themselves. One of the most interesting conclusions of your work is that in Brazil, no one thinks they are rich. The reason is simple: there is always someone richer. The reference is to look up and not at the huge mass of people below. Until we reach Jorge Paulo Lehmann’s level, we are all at the same level Very smitten.
This explains, for example, the phenomenon of VIP areas at shows. It is not enough to be invited and not pay a ticket: there is a VIP area, a VIP area, and a VIP area. Vipões and vipinhos, always in comparison to the other. The author believes that the success of the work is due precisely to curiosity about the lives of wealthy people, but not judgment of them: the desire is to learn how to be like them. Looking at the behavior of the rich is a look of admiration, not criticism. This reading explains much of Odette Reitman’s eternal success. Or the movie “Parasite,” the series “Caliphate,” and “The White Lotus.”
Talking bad about rich people is common. In any bookstore you enter in London, the book that occupies a prominent place is Eurotrash by journalist and writer Christian Cratchit, nominated for this year’s Booker Prize. Unlike Alcoforado, the Swiss begins his writing from subjective imagination: his research is not in the field, like an anthropologist, but from the memories of what he saw and experienced.
In the story, a middle-aged writer named Christian and his elderly mother leave Zurich on a trip to the Alps, trying to rebuild beautiful memories. Cratchit’s acid writing leads us to discover his wealthy family’s past: his drug-addicted mother, Nazi grandfather, and godfather in a sadomasochistic room on the Croisette, summers surrounded by Pucci bikinis in homes on Cap Ferrat, and art collections interspersed with Monk and Max Kauss.
At the beginning of the book, Christian says that the early years of his life were filled with “arrogance, hyperbole, fraud, and decadence.” In describing the dinner held in memory of his father, Christian highlights the entourage of uniformed waiters who, while serving guests, loudly describe “lobster tails with pea extract, Chateaubriand slices, and basil ice cream.” In the author’s words, “bourgeois depression.”
After a long struggle, the government was able to agree to an income tax increase for the rich: only 141,000 Brazilians, in a country with a population of 220 million people. However, parliamentarians still have the audacity to ignore investments related to the real estate market and agribusiness. A French friend who loves Brazil always tells me that the French Green and Yellow Revolution is near. His conviction stems from the fact that the pressure cooker of social inequality cannot continue for much longer. Tip for the rich: If this happens, freeze the brioche.