Na Kirkus:
Three snapshots of lives spent striving but ultimately falling short.
On the surface, these stories have little in common: Each is titled by a month—December, May, August; each takes place in Brazil—the first and last in São Paulo, the second in “the middle of nowhere.” In the first, Lena writes to the creator of a short film playing on a loop in an art gallery near her home. The piece seems to portray her life, but in ways that make her question her lived experience, especially her relationship with Gino, a photographer who accompanied her on a fateful ascent of Everest. In the second, Adán and his wife, Veronica, stop at a hotel that's defunct, but the owner, Nilo, lets them stay anyway. Veronica leaves after one week; Adán seems content on his own, then vanishes, leading Nilo to search for him. In the third, Nadia, a young writer, quits her job to work on a play with Klaus, a much older director who cruises for men to cast in his work. The lone reference to the book’s titular city comes in a gloss at the start of Nadia’s tale—“Sevastopol, a soulless port...a generic scene, the kind with no story to tell.” It is immaterial to what follows, almost an overt wink to the reader that there is no hidden message in this slim volume. Similar metatextual sentiments run throughout: “The stories ran in parallel, never meeting”; “People always tell the same stories, even when they try to tell new stories.” These are merely moments in time, lives lived and—with the possible exception of Nadia’s—lives mismanaged, leaving disappointment, regret, or, at minimum, probing introspection. With deft precision, Fraia bares his characters just enough to reveal only these stories—nothing is extraneous.
Somber, spare stories that let the reader crawl inside, searching for insight, only to be left greedily craving more.
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Na Vulture, Tope Folarin:
When was the last time you found yourself sitting among a group of people you’d never met before? After more than a year of the pandemic it might be hard to pin down the moment, but you may remember how you felt — eddies of language whirling around you, conversational shorthand, inside jokes, and obscure references never quite settling into a narrative you could understand. That’s how I felt reading Sevastopol by Brazilian writer Emilio Fraia: I opened the book and found myself in a story that had seemingly started without me. Based loosely on Leo Tolstoy’s story suite The Sevastopol Sketches, Fraia’s book offers up three glancingly linked stories. In the first, a young woman tells an elliptical tale about her mountain-climbing obsession; in the second, a man disappears while staying at a dilapidated countryside inn; and in the third, a young playwright collaborates with an older theater director to produce a play about a Russian painter and the Crimean city of Sevastopol. Translated from the Portuguese by Zoe Perry, these tales don’t operate the way most tales do; they adhere to their own separate sense of languid time.
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Alexandre Boide, no Instagram:
Livros que remetem a livros (tratando aqui só de ficção) pessoalmente me interessam porque fornecem múltiplas chaves de leitura -- talvez não em um duplo como o Quixote de Pierre Menard, ou um doppelgänger como O Aleph engordado de Pablo Katchadjian, mas em relações um pouco mais distantes, como o fato de The Warriors, de Sol Yurick, ser livremente inspirado na Odisseia.
Sebastopol, de Emilio Fraia, é inspirado em Contos de Sebastopol, de Liev Tolstói. Ambos são compostos de três histórias, com títulos praticamente idênticos. No caso de Tolstói, o tema é o cerco militar à cidade de mesmo nome na Guerra da Crimeia, da resistência à derrocada. No livro de Fraia, com seus personagens em uma espécie de desterro permanente e sujeitos a outros tipos de cercos e batalhas, essa questão é bem mais elusiva.
No primeiro conto, “Dezembro”, é possível encontrar uma simetria mais direta, com uma voz narrativa dirigida a um “você” e a menção a corpos destroçados e ao desejo de resistência. Mas, se por um lado os soldados retratados por Tolstói são submetidos à violência autoritária nos moldes dos impérios pré-1914 (“Nós morreremos, crianças, mas não entregaremos Sebastopol!”), a protagonista de Fraia, que perde as pernas em um acidente na escalada do Everest, parece acossada pelo que o pensador sul-coreano Byung-Chul Han chama de “violência da positividade” (“a desmedida do positivo, que se expressa como superdesempenho e supercomunicação, como um hiperchamar atenção e hiperatividade”) -- ela dá palestras, escreve, é obrigada a recorrer o tempo todo à narrativa exultante da superação do trauma.
Seguindo nessa chave de interpretação, “Maio”, a segunda narrativa, trata da força sufocante do cerco e da aparente futilidade da resistência, tanto em termos materiais como pessoais. Aqui, a força invasora é econômica (o dinheiro chega a ser citado por um personagem como “um tipo de energia”), e todos sabem que a rendição é mera questão de tempo. No plano pessoal, no entanto, ainda resta muito a ser resolvido, e é aí onde reside uma das características mais interessantes de Sebastopol: um intrincado jogo de histórias dentro de histórias.
“Agosto”, o último relato, trata da derrocada. Tanto no livro russo do século XIX como no brasileiro do século XXI, o que se tem são dois personagens (um mais velho, outro mais jovem) tentando fazer algo digno de nota antes de sair de cena. Na Crimeia de Tolstói, a busca pela grandeza é de caráter militar. Na Sebastopol transportada para São Paulo, a batalha é travada contra o próprio ato de narrar. Mas, se no contexto da guerra a derrota significa a morte, no âmbito narrativo essa rendição lança o final de “Sebastopol” de Emilio Fraia em um dos terrenos mais férteis da ficção contemporânea: o impasse.
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Na The Critic Mag, John Self:
Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol isn’t a debut but it is his first book to be translated into English (by Zoë Perry). It’s a string of three stories that … well, the lack of direct connection between them makes me reluctant to invoke the word triptych, but there is a pattern at work. The book was inspired by Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches, and each story is titled after his (“December”, “May”, “August”); and sets up a pair of characters in opposition, destined for disappointment.
In the first and best story, a woman sets out to scale the “Seven Summits”, the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. (I’m sure there were only five when I was at school.) At the same time she has to cope with the legacy of her lover Gino, the sort of filmmaker who makes “a series of commercials for a car brand — commercials in which cars never appear”.
It’s a smart, knotty story, much fuller and more complex than its length should permit, with plenty of space for the reader to think but also some authorial sleight of hand to keep you curious. By comparison the second story, “May”, seemed to me underweight, despite its otherwise satisfying ambiguities in the narrative viewpoint and its account of the two sides of hospitality.
The final story, “August”, was published in the New Yorker (as “Sevastopol”), though this is not a traditional New Yorkery story, just as the collection itself evokes less a South American literary sensibility than a spare, elusive mitteleuropean one. This placelessness is apt enough for a story which is — finally — actually about the debatable land of Sevastopol, the largest city in the Crimean peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
It’s narrated by a woman, Nadia, involved in a play about the siege of Sevastopol. Her narrative is peppered with concise pen portraits (“he sports a showy, swashbuckling moustache”) but really the message is all about art, from Nadia’s advice to the playwright (research is like a cherry in a cocktail, she tells him: “only there so that it can be removed”) to the subject of the play: a war artist who never witnessed the battles he depicted.
Fraia is interested not in the reality of things but its representation. That, after all, is what writing is about. “The chief thing,” we’re told via a soldier in the Crimean war, “is not to think. If you don’t think, it’s nothing much. It mostly all comes from thinking.” I’ll drink — or think — to that.
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