Pages and computer lights

On books (what else?), long-distances relationships, and homecoming

The thing about writing when inspiration hits is that this fickle muse is more often than not M.I.A. and I get stuck with a blank page on my computer screen accompanied by a persistent, if ever so vague, mental white noise.

But every once in a while, something happens, and inspiration, ever so quiet, decides that it needs to tickle your senses and your neurons into action. A spark of something meaningful, something that you can almost grasp with your mental fingers, something that feels honestly important and deserving of attention. Me, I tend to relish in that feeling more than make use of it as an impulse towards writing. Let me feel these ideas, let me sit with them, and nurture them, and then maybe they will become something worth sharing. And impostor syndrome, self-consciousness, fear, you name it, it kicks in and makes that last step impossible. Better not even to try, then, to just stay there with those tingling feelings.

Then something else happens. An unexpected event, a book falls on your lap and it is like the universe, or the muse, or your subconscious yells “Is now a good time?” Yes, now is a good time.

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October was a month of embracing the unhomely and being taken a little out of my comfort zone. I mean, the month demands at the very least vaguely spooky readings. Instead of flying by instruments this time around, jumping from unplanned pick to unplanned pick, I decided to be a little more intentional this year and spent the last week of September selecting the titles I wanted to read for sure, many of which had been sitting on my shelves since last year, just waiting for the right moment. Pre-Halloween was the right moment. The idea was to immerse myself in the strange and unsettling, with a mix of literary styles and forms, and I think I achieved that with my selection of primarily short stories (featuring one short novel). I don’t consider myself a reader of horror, but I do enjoy the liminal space between this- and otherworldly experiences, the tingling sensation that comes from not knowing where the boundaries are (if there are any), the mental goosebumps of being faced with the dangerously unexplained.

Along with the titles in the photo, I also dove into Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” for Haley’s The Closely Reading Book Club—a classic I thoroughly knew about but had never experienced first-hand and in full. There’s something precious in meeting a classic for the first time, no matter how long they are, and this was truly one of those situations where you both feel welcomed by the known and surprised by all the rest.

But this was also a month of continuing my dive into texts I didn’t think myself qualified to dive into. It felt like it was the right time to meet Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” (in no small part inspired by Luka’s post “100 Years of Surrealism”) and Hélène Cixou’s reading of it. I then picked up Tzvetan Todorov’s essay on the fantastique—a fun little trip down the structuralist road and continuing the tearing down of silly walls I build around myself about what I could and could not read. And since this is a safe space for strange theoretical confessions, I have to admit to enjoying all the diagrams and tables a good structuralist text offers the reader. Oh, right, and the discussion about the construction of the eerie and the strange in literature through stylistic and thematic choices is all pretty cool, I guess.

But I couldn’t keep myself on track (or on theme) 100% of the time.

After last year’s National Book Awards for translated literature (The Words That Remain, by Stênio Gardel), I found out about translator Bruna Dantas Lobato and her work as an author, and I knew since it was first announced that I had to read her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, about an international college student from Brazil and her online conversations with her mother back home. And when I heard that she would be in NYC for an event around the launching of the book this month, I knew that I had to go. As I collected my pre-ordered copy and sat down to wait for the event to begin, I decided to open it and read a few pages to pass the time, but I just as quickly decided to close it before getting too far ahead. I knew, within a handful of paragraphs, that Blue Light Hours would suck me in and would require my attention—which it did, as I happily cheated on my Halloween reading stack to spend two days with this short but so incredibly powerful novel.

Daughter arrives in Vermont from Brazil, settles in her dorm room and college life, and talks via Skype with Mother to tell (and not tell) what she has been up to. In one moment at the event, Dantas Lobato reminded the audience how online video calls require narration for daily life to make sense: if your interlocutor doesn’t see it on their screen, you have to tell them. It might sound like a commentary on social media, how the life anyone sees is a highly curated version of what goes offline. But before that, or more intensively for many, it’s also a reality all too well-known for anyone trying to maintain a long-distance relationship of any kind.

What if distance is the antagonist? Bruna Dantas Lobato asks the audience at the book event as well as her readers.

You can go through heartbreak and cardiac emergencies without the people most important to you ever knowing about it until one day you break the news. Being away imposes a separation of bodies and routines, heightened by any circumstances that remind both parties that the distance is not just physical, but also emotional to a certain degree. And this is where the novel, with its sparse but forever-unpackable prose, shines: construing and leading the reader to experience the growing pains of when finding your new self means losing a little bit of the self you have always known—and wondering, even fearing, is this new person will also be the object of the same love and care that you once knew.

Photo by Simon Abrams on Unsplash

Blue Light Hours is not a novel with a forward plot that dazzles you with its momentum, nor does it try to be. As the author so eloquently put during that event, not all stories worth telling require the full traditional narrative arc with a dramatic denouement that comes when you’re at the edge of your seat. Some stories worth telling feel more like lullabies or, as I would put it, a hug of homecoming. This is what would best describe my experience reading the novel: it felt like, with all the differences in experiences and trajectories, the book saw me and opened its pages for me to find myself there.

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Earlier this month I had the opportunity to go to another book event with another translator—this time, Susan Bernofsky, to celebrate her translation of Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. At one point, Bernosfky said the work of translation was “to make understanding happen.” The phrase struck me so much that I jotted it down and the piece of paper with these words, terribly scribbled, has sat on my desk since then. To me, it is a provocation, a reminder that form has its importance but that the content reigns supreme (Todorov would probably slap my wrist and tell me I must not forget that there is no dichotomy between form and content, and that the structure is the one true unit containing and combining both. They would probably be right, what do I know, but I allow myself this emphasis because it is what I need now).

I can’t help but think about that phrase when I think about Blue Light Hours either. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Dantas Lobato is herself a translator, and a lot of times during the event this fact was present underlining the conversation. The book comes across as not just interested in but committed to the potential of narrative and poetic language to describe that which escapes mere description, to communicate emotions without ever needing to name them. Daughter often lists things she sees and finds but never her feelings. At one point, when discussing the writing of the book in English, rather than native Portuguese, she made reference to the fact that, as a translator, she has often had to deal with the whole idea of untranslatable words and how to, well, translate them.

Brazilians will know a handful of these. I have introduced borogodó to my readers, but perhaps the most famous “untranslatable” Lusophone term is saudade (which, the internet teaches me, is also found in the closely related Galician, which is not a huge surprise, and apparently also imported into Spanish). I would say that Blue Light Hours is a book-length translation of what it means to feel saudade: a combination of displacement, longing, nostalgia, and even a bit of fear, that permeates memories and plans. Meaning happens fully, without any need for lexicographic juggling.

I realize nostalgia, or longing, or displacement, does not feel and mean the same for everyone. The type of whole or drive these feelings create is not equal. But what makes literature so great, what makes it something worth spending time with, is the fact that everyone can perhaps find something familiar even in individual narratives. Blue Light Hours may be about a daughter-mother long-distance relationship and how young adults struggle to find themselves away from the family household. More generally, it feels like a love letter to everyone who has had to lose themselves to find themselves, to everyone who chose one thing and wondered about what they left behind, to everyone who feels like Odysseus’s ten years in the sea feels like child’s play next to the sensation of never quite knowing what home feels like anymore.

Blue Light Hours coming with me on a subway ride

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“I felt like I would never stop anticipating my own arrival, waiting for the moment when I’d finally feel at home,” Daughter states on page 42, and perhaps this is the one fragment that caught me off guard and has kept spinning around my head for the past week. Perhaps it’s the reason why I am typing this right now.

You see, just as I had not planned on reading Blue Light Hours this past week, I had not planned on writing about it. But one of my best friends is moving away from the area. And me, I wanted to have told her so many things. I think I said some, though definitely not all. But I want to believe that through my hugs and ours looks and everything that has happened and, no doubt, what is yet to happen, I have done a little translating of my own, of making myself understood somehow. I hope she knows I will not just miss her; it will be saudade.

You would think I would have gotten used to saying goodbyes by now, after years of being in environments where people came and went sometimes faster than you could even realize. But this time felt different. For numerous reasons that are not just my own and that, for this reason, do not feel like mine to share, this time it felt like closing a chapter.

When you’re away from the place you first called home, unsure if the current one deserves or will get to keep the same title in the near future, sometimes your heart fills in the gaps of uncertainty with the people that populate it, they become your home when you are unsure about the perennity of the walls around you. You see yourself arriving at their company rather than any specific geographical location.

To some, you say goodbye knowing that, when you meet again, you will have changed, even if just a little, enough that we might need to spend a few minutes readjusting to each other’s presence, realizing who it is each of us has become in the meantime.

But if my experiences of so-longs have taught me anything is that, despite all this, meeting certain people always feels like homecoming.