segunda-feira, 21 de junho de 2021

seis leituras

Na Tank Magazine, Barbara Epler: 

A remarkable debut: three highly atmospheric and super-saturated stories feature characters yearning, striving and coming apart at the seams: emotions are let loose, and roll off independently like potatoes when their burlap sack moulders away. There is at once a weight and a phosphorescent brightness too (like Dickens’ description of Marley’s ghost shining in the dark like a rotten lobster). Sevastopol is compulsively, palpably engaging and strange in the best sense. Emilio Fraia, a master of the subjects of love and loss, has a knack for levering things into the reader sideways, and shockingly fast: it’s like getting a splinter, but much, much more enjoyable. 

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Na Newcity Lit, Joshua Bohnsack: 

When I started reading Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol (translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry), I made the rash assumption that I had picked up a novel, which led me to question how the three stories that make up this collection fit together. 

Emilio Fraia’s English-language debut may be modeled after Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches, but Sevastopol is much more than a modernized version. Though the three stories in Sevastopol aren’t explicitly connected, together they paint a true portrait of human suffering, equivalent to Tolstoy’s stories of the Crimean War. Fraia redefines the trauma of a physical battle through the lens of his characters’ struggles with nature, culture and the self. 

The collection begins with “December,” where a mountain climber mitigates her obsession with climbing Mount Everest. Reflecting years after the climb which costs Lena, the narrator, her legs, Fraia twists Tolstoy’s rules, with a second-person narration, but as epistolary, instead of Tolstoy’s literal “you.” The opening begins as the narrator watches the footage of her accident, reading, “Watching your video, I was hurled right back into the middle of it. That’s why I’m writing you now.” This transition works to bring the reader into the text, by making you privy to the narrator’s own self-reflection. As I began reading Lena’s account of her climb, I had the audacity to think I, too, could climb a mountain. While going deeper into “December,” I no longer had the urge, but was amazed by the visceral transition I had made within the pages. 

In “May,” a man staying at an abandoned motel vanishes. The motel owner recounts his conversations with Adán, the missing man, who insists on ruining his own life. Another visceral story, this time haunted by the ghost, rather than the terrestrial in “December.” Adán recounts his experiences growing up in a changing Peru, telling his hosts, “What did I learn? That there are animals that spend the winter in deep water. And that with great hope also comes a great lack of hope.” Although I’m not well-versed on late-twentieth-century South American politics, the human aspects of the story were more than enough to keep me honed in. 

While in the final story, “August,” an aging artist, Klaus, befriends a young, directionless narrator, Nadia, over their impending production of a play based on a postcard of Sevastopol, a port where neither character had been. We have a story that takes us into the darkness art can bring upon the artist, a parable at once familiar and devastating. 

The form of the book lends itself to world exploration beyond what Tolstoy deemed “sketches.” Fraia’s collection of “long-short stories” is a much-needed format that feels fully explored, yet at once compact. The text is presented in long paragraphs and frequent section breaks, ending in memorable lines with the white space, allowing the lines to resonate. 

I want to be skeptical of comparisons here, especially since the allusion of Tolstoy is embedded in the spirit of the text, but it’s easy to conjure writers like Roberto Bolaño, Anna Burns and Denis Johnson engrained in Fraia’s prose. The over-layered voices throughout the book create vast worlds that feel nearly mythic, and all too real. Fraia’s aptness for storytelling in Sevastopol lies within the entrancing matter of human suffering. 

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Na Lunate, Jess Moody: 

It is over 160 years since Leo Tolstoy penned Sevastopol Sketches: three narratives set across the Crimean War’s bloody siege in December, May, and August, of 1854-55. These snapshots from the front line were striking in their realism, their form, their exacting exploration of individual ambitions and fears in the most deadly and banal circumstances. 

Centuries forward, and across the world, Brazilian writer Emilio Fraia takes more than inspiration from the Sketches: his three narratives echo back and forth, in conversation with its themes, but also insistent in the question of whether one can ever tell where one story ends and another begins. 

In Fraia’s ‘December’ there is no war. Instead, seemingly a freshness and calm: beach scenes, an empty gallery, a deserted driveway. We are in Brazil, with a young mountaineer who has survived a life-changing accident. Her voice is modern, firm, confident. Yet there are nods to the literary legacy here, if you know where to look. She disarms us with a second person address; there are mirrored images of bandages and amputation of limbs, narrative, relationships, certainty. We see the same motivations to search out extremes as in Tolstoy’s officers -perhaps pride, perhaps fame, perhaps the expectations of others. The sparse, careful prose (a knowing, grounded translation by Zoë Perry) hides shifting truth. Memories are cut up and re-edited like the video footage that our mountaineer watches and remembers – which she may or may not be in. It may, or may not, be her story. 

She vanishes. ‘May’ is seemingly another narrative entirely. We are far from anywhere, in an inn that never really opened, as a middle aged man empties the swimming pool in search of a body. Fraia turns from film to oral history: and the story within story is the drunken anecdotes of a stranger, relayed on unplayed tennis courts. Personal tragedies are folded amongst the social turmoil of Peru and Brazil, full of the regrets of age, loneliness, and sickness. Tolstoy’s ‘May’ contrasts bloody streets with white flags, dancing with détente. Fraia too makes the centre of his triptych a space of waiting; the interim before the fall. What corpse will be carried home? What is it to learn the life of characters who are already vanishing? Can a man leave behind only his story? 

In ‘August’ we are back to the city, and youth, and crappy wages and break-up fallout. Looping in yet another narrative art, the author focuses in on fading dramatist Klaus, who invites young Nadia to help with research for his play (based on a vague misunderstanding that she has an ‘interest in Russia’). In this third story Fraia introduces the Sevastopol siege itself as subject matter through the life and artificial brushstrokes of a wartime artist. Klaus and Nadia’s relationship becomes consumed by questions of plot, character, casting, what they need from each other, and the weight of a pause. ‘August’ offers us few conclusions, a tale and two lives meandering, constructing and failing. 

Fraia’s prose is at turns meditative, mournful, and dreamlike; both a detached voiceover commentary, and a rough confession of disappointed desires. In the short, sharp sentences there is humanity, but little judgement. Things happen. Decisions are made. People hurt each other, and are hurt in return. The characters were there, now they are here, or they are gone. There may or may not be connection between…well, anything. Stories are told and re-told, and talk to each other. At the fall of Sevastapol, Tolstoy’s soldiers and sailors stare back at their lost city with incomprehension. Fraia is confident enough to let the seasons turn, and the pages turn with them; to layer together the glimpses of moments and memories for your interpretation, and your own meaning. 

‘He used to paint figures and set them aside, then arrange them against backgrounds he’d prepared separately. So, even when the figures interacted with one another, the connection between them seemed unnatural. Their eyes…almost never seemed to meet...’ 

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No The Monthly Booking, Eleanor Updegraff: 

The characters in Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol are all a little bit lost. A young female mountaineer, obsessed with climbing Mount Everest, conflates her damaging relationship with the mountain and her equally unsuccessful relationships with men, particularly the older and unreliable Gino. An elderly man, eking out his last years at an abandoned country hotel, receives an unexpected visit from Adán, a young Peruvian-Brazilian man who seems at home in neither country and vanishes into the forest shortly afterwards. And Nadia, a young student who has dreams of being a writer, becomes entangled with Klaus, a failing playwright working on a production about a Russian artist who witnesses but never actually paints the Crimean War. Distinct they may be, yet certain threads run through these three stories, cleverly connecting their characters not so much by events as by themes and emotions. In an assured translation by Zoë Perry, Sevastopol introduces English-speaking readers to a young Brazilian author who is more than deserving of international attention. 

Inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches and named after the months given in their titles – December, May and August – Fraia’s stories in fact have very little to do with Crimea’s largest and most famous city. Sevastopol puts in an appearance only in the last story, and then solely in distanced form: an image on a postcard, streets on a map, tumbledown buildings imagined by the main characters. All the same, there is a certain melancholy attached to the book that seems reminiscent of people’s desire to conjure far-off places, that particular form of longing for a city never visited but where things could be better. Whether through art, travel, physical exertion or literal disappearance, each of the characters we encounter is yearning to escape. 

It is always the sign of a good story when the reader would gladly read on, and all three stories in Sevastopol are filled with enough atmosphere and compelling characterisation to create exactly this effect. Fraia is an excellent observer of people and draws them for us using two simultaneous techniques: details about his characters are given away by their thoughts and actions, but also by the stories they tell about themselves. ‘December’ and ‘August’ feature first-person narrators, while in ‘May’ the young man, Adán, tells his life story to his ageing host, Nilo, in dialogue that is entirely without quotation marks, allowing it to bleed into the main text. This is just one instance of a story within a story, one of the main themes that runs through the book and makes the reader question how much we can really know of other people – or, indeed, ourselves. 

Though on the surface Sevastopol may seem a quiet book, full of sparing prose and stripped-back imagery, Fraia’s evident interest in the nature of storytelling adds considerable nuance and depth. This is perhaps most clear to see in the final story, ‘August’, in which the two main characters spend most of their time writing or otherwise telling stories. Not only is a play the main subject of the story, but Nadia, our narrator, continually drafts and redrafts a story about a man and a woman (also called Nadia) whose relationship is clearly complex yet undefined. The details of her life that she narrates to others – her parents and playwright Klaus, mostly – are also a form of storytelling, helping her to make sense of her life and the society she finds herself in. The last line of ‘August’ is particularly telling: in Nadia’s story, her two main characters find themselves on an ‘avenue, which grew wider and wider and impossible to cross’. Nadia’s own struggle to reconcile the different parts of her life – studies, writing, work and relationships, all nebulous – seems much like someone hovering on the edge of a stream of traffic, needing but not quite daring to cross. 

More daring are the other main characters, Adán in ‘May’ and the young mountaineer in ‘December’, though their actions don’t necessarily result in a fate that is any clearer or more reassuring. As he tells Nilo about the grief and loss he has experienced in his life, Adán’s story becomes about ‘how we keep falling, from one ordeal to another’. There is something hopelessly inevitable about the events he relates, just as there is about the fate we sense will eventually befall the old man, alone but for a faithful employee on a crumbling farm that is ‘drowning in the landscape’. Interestingly, while Fraia’s main characters are all young and have great potential – creative talent, determination, strength, brains, ambition – they seem somehow more washed-up than their older counterparts. Another line from Adán’s story rings terribly true in this context: ‘with great hope also comes a great lack of hope’. Here, youth and potential seem to wander hand in hand with despair. 

Despite being able to tease these darker themes out of the strands of the book, Sevastopol is an absorbing and enjoyable collection to read, transporting us effortlessly to the backstreets of São Paulo or the slopes of Everest. Though some characters, such as Klaus, are not meant to be very likeable, the narrators are sympathetically portrayed and entirely real in their small quirks or at times baffling emotions. Fraia writes with a sense of detachment – brief sentences, light on adjectives – and the stories are presented in fragments, short sections that at first glance don’t always follow on from one another. Here, Perry’s English translation is razor-sharp: her language is light, yet weighty with that overarching sense of melancholy; punctuation plays an important role in giving the stories their own particular rhythm. 

Many-layered and exquisitely crafted, concerned with art – each of the stories is prefaced by a distorted image pertaining to its geographical theme – and the stories we tell ourselves and others, Sevastopol is about using words to make sense of life, and how even the smallest stories are interconnected. Linked yet individual, with intriguing characters who undergo transformations before our eyes, the disarming simplicity with which these stories are written belies their haunting complexity. A book to think about long after you have finished, Sevastopol clearly shows Fraia to be a masterful contemporary storyteller. 

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No Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks: 

Translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry, it shuffles through a selection of pointillist short stories and metafictions: A mountain climber who lost her legs summiting Everest recalls the disastrous expedition; an aging Brazilian farmer searches for a mysterious stranger who came to live on his property and then disappeared; in São Paulo, two mismatched artists try to write a play about a Russian painter who lived during the Crimean War. 

That painter, an invented figure called Bogdan Trunov, is said to have arranged separate compositions so that “even when the figures interacted with one another, the connection between them seemed unnatural.” The fragmentary character of this allusive, mercurial book is such that, when you finish it, you have an assortment of eye-catching puzzle pieces but no clear sense of how they’re meant to go together. 

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No The Complete Review,  M.A. Orthofer

Emilio Fraia's Sevastopol clearly alludes to Leo Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches, not just in its title but in its composition, with three pieces titled (as in the Tolstoy) 'December', 'May', and August' -- even as otherwise any connections are far less obvious; the stories in Sevastopol are not scenes of war, and they are not set around the Crimean locale; only in the final story does the place and time Tolstoy described figure in any significant way. 

Sevastopol is very much about story-telling. The narrators of 'December' and 'May' each recount significant experiences from their lives but in each a separate story also figures prominently, stories within the stories: in 'December' the narrator comes across a video that clearly is based on her life yet in which: "Everything was inaccurate", while in 'August' the narrator, Nina, describes a theater-project she long worked on (featuring a painter, and set in nineteenth century Sevastopol). So also 'May' -- written in the third person -- first focuses on the mysterious disappearance of Adán but then repeatedly turns to Adán's own story-telling. 

In all three pieces there are also other incidental examples of stories being told; typically, in 'August', Nina describes being at an Alcoholics Anonymous-type support group and listening to one woman, whose testimony switches back and forth between her family situation and "a story about the ocean, the waves"; the way: "The stories ran in parallel, never meeting" is reflected in Sevastopol as well, in both the whole and its parts. 

'December' is narrated by Lena, a woman who had been a mountain climber; her project (as she called it) had been: "to reach the summit of the highest mountains of each of the seven continents". When only in her early twenties she had already had considerable success. Scaling Everest, however, everything changed. Her story was then presented to the public -- recorded by the photographer and documentary filmmaker Gino, recounted in Reader's Digest and National Geographic, and also by her: 

I went out and told my story. I gave interviews. I did more than one TED talk. I made money. I became a successful speaker, someone who had beat the odds, overcome adversity, and moved forward with her head held high. 

When Lena comes across Gino's video-version of her story, part of her sees it as a betrayal: "How could someone have twisted my story so horribly ?" Yet ultimately she's led to wonder: 

(W)hat's the difference between the story in this video of yours and the one I've told myself for so long ? Is there even a difference, in the end ? 

'May' is set in an out-of-the-way failed countryside inn -- "an all-but-abandoned-spot in the middle of nowhere, drowning in the landscape, looking like it was about to get swallowed by the surrounding wilderness". The owner, Nilo, clings on to it in its final collapse. When a couple arrived, looking for a place to stay, he offered them a room; the wife, Veronica, soon flees, but the man, Adán, stays for two weeks -- before suddenly disappearing. The story moves back and forth between the present-moment search for Adán, and the story Adán has to tell, from his past. 

In 'August' a young woman, Nadia, describes getting involved with the work of aging, theater-obsessed Klaus, helping him with a play-project. Set in 1855: 

It's about the life of a painter, Bogdan Trunov, a man who reached his heyday during the war years and then died young. He left behind many paintings, which have only fairly recently been discovered. What's most fascinating, Klaus said, is the way Trunov was always breathing the leaden air of war -- he was up to his neck in it -- but the war, the war itself, never appeared in his paintings. 

The project is an episode in her life. She quits her job to devote herself to it, and sees it through, but Klaus -- and she -- then also move on. Even so, the story -- in and of the play -- remain with her. As she notes, reflecting on all this: "People always tell the same stories, even when they try to tell new stories". 

Fraia suggests story-telling -- the stories we tell ourselves, and of ourselves -- is both fundamental and very basic. We cling and return to it, to try to impose some order and make some sense: as Lena put it: 

I did what people do all the time. Tell stories, retell them, freeze them in time, try to make sense of them. This is me, I exist, this is my story, this happened to me 

But story-telling only gets us so far. As Adán suggests: 

(P)eople have just two or three stories in their lives. You won't learn anything from it. No one learns anything from any story. 

The three pieces in Sevastopol are nicely presented, well-written and atmospheric. Fraia manage to keep the common theme of story-telling as under-current, not drowning his stories in it (even as it is omnipresent), and the interweaving back-and-forth in each of the tales is very effective. It makes for a solid little volume -- fine reading.
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