SOURCE: Siddiqi, Bilqis. Review of The Beautiful Empire, by Zulfikar Ghose. World Literature Today 51, no. 1 (winter 1977): 159.

In the following review, Siddiqi praises Ghose's ironic prose in The Beautiful Empire.

The Beautiful Empire is a checkered history of Gregorio Peixoto da Silva Xavier's life during the rubber boom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Son of a Brazilian father and English mother, he fights for Brazil, visits his widowed father in England after the war and returns to become fabulously rich as a rubber magnate, but chiefly as an owner of luxurious floating brothels. Times change, the Amazon loses its rubber monopoly, Gregorio's beloved wife dies, and he travels south to recover from shock. He is taken for a god at one place and for the reincarnation of a long-deceased national hero at another. He is also involved in a revolution before he returns to Manaos. He is about to leave for...