{"id":294746,"date":"2013-08-02T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-02T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/08\/02\/the-book-of-emotions-2\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:56:35","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:56:35","slug":"the-book-of-emotions-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/08\/02\/the-book-of-emotions-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Book of Emotions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jo\u00e3o Almino\u2019s The Book of Emotions<\/em> is the prototypical Dalkey Archive book. Not that all of Dalkey\u2019s books are the same, but there is a certain set of criteria that a lot of their titles have\u2014and which Almino\u2019s novel has in spades:<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n
  1. It\u2019s a book about someone trying to write a book.<\/li>\n

    From Mulligan Stew<\/em> to At Swim-Two-Birds<\/em> to The Journalist<\/em>, this is a set-up that runs through a lot of Dalkey\u2019s titles. In this case, Cadu, a former photographer is constructing a memoir about his life in Bras\u00edlia out of some of his old photos. The text alternates from his personal \u201ccurrent moment\u201d experiences (which mostly revolve around trying to set up his goddaughter while sexually crushing on the girl helping him organize his photo files) and the text of his book, entitled \u201cThe Book of Emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n

  2. The main character\u2019s life didn\u2019t turn out the way he had hoped.<\/li>\n

    If you\u2019ve never read the \u201cLetters to the Editor\u201d from the back of the Review of Contemporary Fiction<\/em>, you really should. A good number of them are quite hysterical, generally featuring a decrepit old man whose life has unraveled. In the case of The Book of Emotions<\/em>, the aforementioned photographer is still pining away for Joana, the woman he loved who left him for a corrupt politician. Not that our protagonist doesn\u2019t have his share of women\u2014it seems like he\u2019s slept with everyone\u2014but that never seems to work out either: the boy he fathered doesn\u2019t know him and is in prison, the woman he marries dies tragically young, etc.<\/p>\n

  3. The protagonist has mental or health issues.<\/li>\n

    This is true of most every book in the world, but in keeping with the sad sack people who write into RCF<\/span><\/em> with their problems, Cadu is blind and pretty much bed ridden. His best days are behind him, and he\u2019s trapped with just the memories of his life, loves, and pictures. Which brings up the fourth key aspect to a \u201ctypical\u201d Dalkey book . . .<\/p>\n

  4. The narrative works by illustrating the strangenesses of the character\u2019s way of thinking.<\/li>\n

    A perfect example of this is Iceland<\/em> by Jim Krusoe. Or any of the Toussaint books that Dalkey has published. Actually, to be honest, you could throw a dart at a wall of Dalkey titles and whatever you hit will likely feature a quirky narrator whose prose illuminates all the bizarreness of his mind. And The Book of Emotions<\/em> falls into that general grouping, with the one difference that, although the entire text consists of Cadu\u2019s thoughts and reactions to what goes on around him, the book doesn\u2019t quite come together with the panache and humor that is evident in the examples above. There is something intriguing about The Book of Emotions<\/em>, but unfortunately, it\u2019s not the narrator\u2019s voice. <\/p>\n

    What I like about this book is its overall structure\u2014the parallel times, the numbered sections each centered around a particular (unseen) photograph\u2014and the fact that it\u2019s set in 2022 in Bras\u00edlia and is part of Almino\u2019s \u201cBras\u00edlia Quintet.\u201d (Five Seasons of Love<\/em>, which is available from Host Publications features one of the characters from this novel, and the forthcoming Free City<\/em> is part of this series as well.) There are some moving moments in this book, but on the whole it\u2019s a relatively sterile, exacting depiction of a man\u2019s life and missed opportunities. <\/p>\n

    Unfortunately, I feel like Almino\u2019s prose in Elizabeth Jackson\u2019s translation falls a bit flat. There\u2019s something too precise or rote . . . too straightforward in a way that is lacking and fails to really replicate the inner workings of the narrator\u2019s mind:<\/p>\n

    \n

    When Joana and I discovered that we couldn\u2019t have children, we didn\u2019t undergo the tests to determine whose problem it was. That impossibility was a blessing: we didn\u2019t want to have children. However, it was unlikely the infertility was mine because many years before in Bras\u00edlia another woman had conceived my child. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    That \u201canother woman had conceived my child\u201d is just so stiff . . . One other example of where I think the voice in this book falls short from one of the sex scenes:<\/p>\n

    \n

    We traded the most crude and vulgar exchanges, I used the foulest profanities I knew and yelled whatever else I could to shock her. Marcela wasn\u2019t to be outdone. She dominated that rich vocabulary better than I did and she wasn\u2019t intimidated, as if she\u2019d had experience with phone sex. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    This isn\u2019t to write off Almino\u2014I think he\u2019s one of the most interesting Brazilian writers working today, and I\u2019m looking forward to reading more of his titles. (Especially Where to Spent the End of the World<\/em>.) I just went into this with high hopes\u2014see list above and my belief that this would be a very Dalkeyish Dalkey book\u2014and came to see the prose as something I had to trudge through, more out of a sense of duty and abstract interest in the plot than because I really enjoyed<\/em> it. \n<\/ol><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Jo\u00e3o Almino\u2019s The Book of Emotions is the prototypical Dalkey Archive book. Not that all of Dalkey\u2019s books are the same, but there is a certain set of criteria that a lot of their titles have\u2014and which Almino\u2019s novel has in spades: It\u2019s a book about someone trying to write a book. From Mulligan Stew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[9196,7666,17496,48796,48786,1646,52486],"class_list":["post-294746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-brazilian-literature","tag-chad-w-post","tag-dalkey-archive-press","tag-elizabeth-jackson","tag-joao-almino","tag-review","tag-the-book-of-emotions"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318156,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294746\/revisions\/318156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}