Entertainment

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

"I think you've got the wrong guy," Mr. Hunter remembers telling the caller, who had identified himself as his Brazilian publisher. "I never wrote a book by that title."

But in 1998 Mr. Hunter had published a novel in the United States called The Servant. Without his knowledge, a publishing company had translated the book into Portuguese and renamed it. The parable has held the No. 1 slot on Brazil's overall best-seller lists for about 70 weeks, and Mr. Hunter has become something of a celebrity in that country.

His novel tells the story of a business executive who 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.

In Brazil, the 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 best-seller," said Tomás da Veiga Pereira, the publisher who shepherded Mr. Hunter's book and The Da Vinci Code to the Brazilian marketplace.

Mr. Pereira was scouring Amazon.com for books in the "Religion & Spirituality" category about four years ago. He had good reason: Brazil has more Roman Catholics than any other country.

Mr. Pereira said he figured that the book's premise, that leaders should serve their employees, would be provocative in a country that inherited rigid views of authority 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. "They don't have very good reputations here, so we had to think of something different," Mr. Pereira said.

Some critics dismiss the book's spiritual content as manipulative.

"You learn this stuff when you're 6 or 7 years old in Sunday school," said Gutemberg 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 underscores a truth that people need to be reminded of. Edson Grimello, who works behind the counter at Cultura bookstore in São Paulo, has seen a lot of copies of Mr. Hunter's book pass across his register.

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

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