Emilio Fraia, Sevastopol, Trans. by Zoë Perry,
New Directions, 2021.
Three subtly connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, each burrowing into a turning point in a person’s life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty, semi-abandoned inn in the haunted depths of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers.
Inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist, in a restrained manner reminiscent of Anton Chekhov, Roberto Bolaño, and Rachel Cusk.
A truly beautiful book that is hard to describe without using words like precision, subtlety and, mostly, wisdom.—Alejandro Zambra
Three stories track the wanderings of contemporary Brazilians in Fraia’s subtle and melancholy English-language debut, a collection inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches.
—Publishers Weekly
Like the writers I most admire, Fraia sets for himself the hardest and most respectable task a writer can face: unraveling the mystery without revealing the secret. —Javier Montes
Three stories track the wanderings of contemporary Brazilians in Fraia’s subtle and melancholy English-language debut, a collection inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches. In “December,” the 20-something Lena tries to avoid a life of stultifying office work by becoming the first Brazilian woman to climb the tallest peak on every continent, with her lover Gino, a photographer, accompanying her on an ascent of Mount Everest. In “May,” a man goes missing while staying at a run-down countryside inn. Before his disappearance, he tells a meandering story of his life in Lima, Peru, in the 1980s, a time when “the city’s air was poisonous.” And in “August,” an aimless young woman teams up with Klaus, an older theater director, to write a play about a 19th-century Russian painter, though the lonely Klaus may really just be “seeking some kind of accomplice in his sadness.” Situations and motifs recur within and between the stories; for example, a ritual of mountaintop sacrifice described in “May” echoes the ordeal undergone by Lena and other climbers in “December.” These reflective, self-aware tales eschew linear narration in favor of the characters’ somewhat understated thematic musings. In the end, the reader is left to piece together the sketches in this promising if somewhat underwhelming triptych on the nature of storytelling. - Publishers Weekly
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. - Kirkus Reviews
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.
Sevastopol by Emilio Fraia [trans. by Zoë Perry] Lolli Editions, £12.99
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.
Fraia is interested not in the reality of things but its representation. That, after all, is what writing is about
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. - John Self
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/june-2021/debutant-novels-and-great-expectations/
This novel was inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, though there does not seem to be a great deal of similarity between the two. Tolstoy’s work was, as the title tells us, based on his visit to Sevastopol during the Crimean War and describes, in three sketches what he saw. This book consists of three stories, which have the same titles as The Sevastopol Sketches – December, May and August – but there the similarity ends. These stories are fictions. Each is set partially in Brazil and partially in another country,- Nepal, Peru and Russia respectively. The last one is called Sevastopol and is set partially in Sevastopol during the Crimean War but mainly in modern-day Brazil.
So what links these stories, apart from all being set partially in Brazil and sharing their titles with the Tolstoy work? On the surface, not a great deal is the answer. However, there is one common theme. All deal with a relationship (only one is romantic/sexual) which starts and ends during the course of the story and in which some problematic event occurs which hastens the end of the relationship.
Out first story is called December and is narrated by Lena. She comes from a well-off Brazilian family and is a keen mountain climber, so much so that she plans to become the first Brazilian woman to climb the Seven Summits. i.e. the highest mountain in each continent. She has trained hard, got her sponsorship and got a team together.
We know from the beginning of the story that she has a serious accident and we later learn the full details. She had had an affair with Gino, an Italian who had moved with his family to Brazil when a teenager. Gino was also a climber but, above all, he he made videos. He makes a video of her voice talking over shots of a mountain landscape which, she says, gives the whole video a dreamlike feeling. - The Modrn Novel
read more here: https://www.themodernnovel.org/americas/latin-america/brazil/emilio-fraia/sevastopol/
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. - M.A.Orthofer
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.