By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 12, 2006

SAO PAULO, Brazil, Aug. 11 -- James C. Hunter got a long-distance telephone call last year telling him that his book "The Monk and the Executive" was dominating the bestseller lists in Brazil. He was perplexed.

"I think you've got the wrong guy," Hunter remembers telling the man on the other end of the line, who had identified himself as his Brazilian publisher. "I never wrote a book by that title."

But in 1998 Hunter had published a novel in the United States called "The Servant." Without his knowledge, a publishing company had translated the book into Portuguese, renamed it and witnessed a phenomenon unfold. The parable has held the No. 1 slot on Brazil's overall bestseller lists for about 70 weeks, and Hunter has become something of a celebrity in a country that he rarely had given a thought to before. Another book of his -- a motivational manual for business leaders -- earlier this year bumped "The Da Vinci Code" out of the No. 2 spot on the lists.

"I never dreamed a book I wrote almost 10 years ago would be such a success down there," said Hunter, 51, who has visited Brazil five times in the past year. "I knew very little about Brazil before -- it just wasn't in my realm of thinking at all. Now, it's very prominent."

He's not the only author whose attention has been drawn toward these tropical latitudes. The world's fifth-largest country is an enormous book market, ripe for authors who might have been overlooked in their home countries but haven't abandoned the dream of an out-of-the-blue triumph. Brazil also attracts internationally celebrated authors. This week in Parati -- a town between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro -- Toni Morrison, Edmund White, Jonathan Safran Foer and Christopher Hitchens are promoting their books at a literary festival.

But none has enjoyed the success in Brazil that Hunter has.

His novel tells the story of a business executive who reluctantly attends a leadership retreat at a Benedictine monastery, where he undergoes a spiritual transformation, ultimately realizing that service and sacrifice are the keys to success. After "The Servant" was published in the United States, Hunter was pleased with annual sales of about 25,000 copies. On the Amazon.com sales list this week, the book was placed at No. 6,855.

But in Brazil, his book has sold more than a million copies in the past two years.

"Normally, if a book sells 100,000 copies in Brazil, that's considered an amazing bestseller," said Tomás da Veiga Pereira, the publisher who shepherded Hunter's book and "The Da Vinci Code" to the Brazilian marketplace. "Everybody tries to come up with theories to explain it. It's really a phenomenon."

Pereira, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, was scouring Amazon.com for books in the "Religion & Spirituality" category about four years ago. He had good reason to do so: Brazil has more Roman Catholics than any country in the world, as well as a burgeoning evangelical movement, and the varying denominations are often mixed with African rituals that have survived from the country's slave culture.

It is not a coincidence, Pereira said, that all three books in the top slots on this week's bestseller list hang on spiritual hooks. (The No. 2 is "The Greatest Psychologist Who Ever Lived: Jesus and the Wisdom of the Soul," by American therapist Mark W. Baker, which was listed as the 98,764th bestseller on Amazon this week.)

Pereira said he figured that the table-turning premise of Hunter's book -- that leaders should serve their employees, not the other way around -- would be automatically provocative in a country that inherited rigid views of authority and subservience from its Portuguese colonialists.

The problem was the title, he said. Naming the book "The Servant" would have led people to think it was about a public servant, or a politician.

"They don't have very good reputations here, so we had to think of something different," Pereira said.

Some of the book's critics call it overly simplistic and dismiss its spiritual content as manipulative.

"You learn this stuff when you're 6 or 7 years old in Sunday school," said Gutemberg B. de Macedo, a business consultant who occasionally reviews business and religious books for Brazilian magazines. "This is the new trend in Brazil. They are using the name of Christ to make money."

Fans of the book don't see it that way. Even if the material isn't new, they say, the book simply underscores a truth that people need to be reminded of more than taught. Edson Grimello, who works behind the counter at Cultura bookstore in Sao Paulo, has seen a lot of copies of Hunter's book pass across his register. It is a light and quick read, he said, and one that buyers often recommend to friends.

"I think people read it for the same reason they read the Harry Potter books," said Grimello. "It's because everyone else is reading it. It's like a fashion trend."

Hunter, meanwhile, is making the most of it. He's planning another trip to Brazil next month to give a series of leadership seminars throughout the country.

"Every time I go down there, it's practically a life-changing experience," Hunter said. "I realize how much bigger the world really is. And I thought I was pretty worldly before."