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The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece written by Camila Santos on The Book of Emotions, by João Almino, translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Jackson and published by Dalkey Archive Press.
The Book of Emotions is Almino’s second novel translated into English, the first being The Five Seasons of Love (also translated by Elizabeth Jackson), published by Host Publications.
Here is a bit of the review:
João Almino, the novelist and diplomat, is—like the narrator of The Book of Emotions—a photographer and an outsider to Brasília. He was born in Mossoró, in the Brazilian Northeast. This is a poor region that has, much like the American South, produced a long list of influential writers such as Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and Guimarães Rosa. In the beginning of Almino’s career, one of his biggest dilemmas was whether to set his fiction in the Northeast or in Brasília, where he had lived for ten years. He decided on Brasília because it offered him the freedom to “trace a path that had not yet been followed, to try and create the sort of literature that had little to do with the picturesque, with clichés, with what was already so well know.” In an online interview for Saraiva Conteúdo, the portal for one of Brazil’s largest bookstore, he says, “Brasília is a place with an open, erratic, multiple identity that can assimilate what comes from the outside.”
To read the whole review, click here.
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Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
