Sevastopol

by Emilio Fraia, Zoe Perry (Translator)

Overview

Three subtly connected stories converge in this chimerical debut, showcasing a powerful new Brazilian voice

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 Bolano, and Rachel Cusk.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811230926
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/01/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Emilio Fraia was born in Sao Paulo in 1982. Sevastopol, his third book, was one of the winners of the Biblioteca Nacional Prize and a finalist for the Oceanos Prize and Jabuti Prize. One of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Writers, Fraia is an editor and has been awarded a Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship.
Zoë Perry's translations of contemporary Portuguese-language fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Words Without Borders, and the Washington Square Review. In 2015 she was translator-in-residence at the FLIP international literary festival in Paraty, Brazil, and she was awarded a PEN/Heim grant for her translation of Veronica Stigger's novel Opisanie swiata. Zoë is a founding member of the London-based translators collective, The Starling Bureau.

Editorial Reviews

04/05/2021

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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"A truly beautiful book that is hard to describe without using words like precision, subtlety and, mostly, wisdom."

Alejandro Zambra

"A vibe is, by definition, inexplicable. To say Sevastopol’s vibe is a bit gloomy, desolate, styled in a color palette that includes grays, greens, and violets, is both true and inexact. The vibe accumulates over time and amounts to something. But exactly what remains evasive, thrillingly open-ended."

Public Books - Melanie Broder

"Quite excellent."

Full Stop - Erin Bloom

"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

"As Sevastopol masterfully demonstrates, all one can do against time’s attrition is organize the losses into a story of the self."

Southwest Review - Marshall Shord

"These tales don’t operate the way most tales do; they adhere to their own separate sense of languid time."

Vulture - Tope Folarin

"A literary jewel."

Fernanda Torres

2021-03-17
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