TWELVE FINGERS

A larky comic picaresque—a cross between Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik and Woody Allen’s Zelig—from Brazilian TV talk-show host Soares (A Samba for Sherlock, 1997).

Soares’s blissfully unheroic protagonist is Dimitri Korozec, son of a Brazilian circus acrobat and a radical Bosnian linotypist. Born (in 1897) with an extra index finger on each hand, “Dimo” is thus destined—not for greatness, but for an epical talent for gaucherie, which manifests itself throughout succeeding decades, as his “dream . . . of eliminating all the world’s tyrants” goes repeatedly unrealized. Trained as an apprentice assassin by the Society of the Black Hand, Korozec arrives in Sarajevo (in 1914) in time to beat anarchist Gavrilo Princip to the punch, but Dimo’s finger gets stuck in his pistol’s trigger guard—and it’s Princip who whacks the Archduke Ferdinand, earning the historic infamy to which Dimo aspires. Similar mishaps dog Dimo’s awkward peregrinations through Paris (where Socialist Jean Jaurès declines the chocolate bombe offered by Dimo, ineptly disguised as a waiter—and someone else gets to murder Jaurès), Hollywood, and Rio de Janeiro: Dimo’s pursuit of archvillainy is sidetracked by adventures with such accidentally encountered persons as Mata Hari, Marie Curie, George Raft, and Al Capone. No gag is too obvious for Soares: pratfalls multiply exponentially, and Dimo is stalked by both a suicidal Gallic policier named Javert and a vengeful Indian dwarf with a tendency toward ludicrous accidents every bit as monumental as his intended quarry’s. The narrative also embraces excerpts from Dimo’s (of course) unfinished autobiography Memories and Lapses, and concludes with an “Epilogue” recounting a failed 1954 attempt on the life of Egypt’s President Nasser (Dino doesn’t get much done, but he does get around).

A lot of fun, in between groans, and a real improvement over Soares’s rather thin first novel. This one really ought to be filmed.