Book review: All Dogs Are Blue, By Rodrigo Souza Leão

This book is about being messed up, and "then being messed up even more by numbing doses of pharmaceuticals", Deborah Levy tells us in her introduction to this short, stunning read.

Set in a mental institution in Rio, and told through the medicated lens of its witty, schizophrenic narrator (who is "abducted by aliens" and turned into a plant, among other delusions) Leão's autobiographical novel, translated from Portuguese by Zoë Perry and Stefan Tobler, weaves the lives of the poor with the insane, and poetry with psychosis.