“I won’t ever be able to return to the Trastevere district of Rome and enter the Libreria del Cinema without thinking that here, on the night of July 14, 2008, the great J.P. Cuenca died, a young Brazilian author I admired and whom I was sure would become one of the great writers of Latin America. Simulation and disappearance, subjects treated with kid gloves, were the linchpins of his narrative, and I have no doubt that, had he carried on living and writing, he would have been capable of anything, even of writing after death.”

“The plot alone would make this the book of a lifetime. Or of a year. And it is both.”

“A nonstop oddity from the very start: and then, always, the tragic irony of Cuenca—his distant lucidity, at times awful, in relation to himself.”

“This is a hallucinating and hallucinatory book, that, like every great thriller, seduces the reader from beginning to end.”

“Descobri que estava morto is able to perform a feat: the slow-motion death of a character and the echo of death from his city. We can’t tell where the putrefaction of space begins and where the putrefaction of the literary body ends. (...). By proposing a novel that negates the Rio de Janeiro landscape during that portentous and tragic 21st century, Cuenca has published a perfect epitaph whose title, instead of referring to the writer, speaks more to the scenery where the tragedy unfolds.”

“A vigorous investigation, in the heat of the moment, about the artistic experience in times of democratic retraction, and about the increasing normalization of a state of emergency. In that sense, the final pages of the novel—not only the violent confrontation with the men of the law but also the narrator’s confrontation with his own history—simultaneously perform a sort of perverse twist on the routine discussions about auto-fiction, about fact and fiction, and literally invite the narrator to expose himself not only as a split figure, but as a dead end.”

“By stripping down his own self and the city that he both loves and hates in a mature and macrocosmic novel, João Paulo Cuenca takes three sure shots. He dissects himself in public with a Dithyramb capable of revealing the darkest depths of the narrator-writer and of knocking out all the hollow, vain, and innocuous literature that most contemporary Brazilian writers have made in recent decades on the first round. He conceives one of the most resounding and spectacular pieces of Brazilian literature of the still-young 21st century. And he makes the us readers plunge into a vortex of “Cuenquian” writing, as though we were sinking into a quicksand that we can only escape from on the last hallucinating page.”

“Cuenca’s novel narrates a paradox more insidious than that of the dead man who speaks. He speaks about how people turn into themselves, what tortuous, comical, and simultaneously accidental and fatal ways a subject transforms the (external) past into a (personal) path. (....) Cuenca doesn’t only unravel the B-side of the ‘cidade maravilhosa,’ dark and crazy, at the same time archaic and futuristic, when he forgets himself: it’s above all about the thickness of senses, the prodigious density of historical layers, the complexity of the strong, forceful relationships that build and destroy Rio, that decrepit Rio in the center, the irredeemable black sheep of tourist packages.”