Gustavo Scarpa, the footballer who has made a book by Tolstoy number one in sales in Brazil

The player of Atlético Mineiro Gustavo Scarpa has managed to break all the molds with a literary recommendation. The Brazilian medium, who usually shares his love for reading and chess, made a recommendation of a classic of Russian literature, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’, by Leo Tolstoy. Days later, the book has become number 1 in sales on Amazon Brazil, just 140 years after its publication.

In a video uploaded to his YouTube channel, @Scarpinha, Scarpa summarizes the book’s argument and explains his recommendation with a personal analysis. 700,000 people have seen your review. Added to them are 1 million in the Instagram cut. Additionally, searches on Google have tripled.

Other recommendations from Scarpa, a former Nottingham Forest player who also shares live chess games and who has been talking about literature on social media since 2019, are gaining more and more views in an initiative that goes against the grain of many of his fellow footballers.