Sevastopol is published by the phenomenal Lolli Editions, like several of my recent new favourite books, and is a 2021 translation (by Zoë Perry) of a 2018 Brazilian text. According to the blurb, it is inspired by Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches, a piece of writing I am not familiar with, so though I will offer some thoughts, some reactions, to Fraia’s work, my unfamiliarity with that Tolstoy work may render my opinions (if they’re ever anything but) fundamentally pointless?
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The book – a beautiful object, stylish and pleasant to hold – contains three short stories, all of which are distinct and though one could argue they have aligning “themes”, the same argument could probably be made about any three pieces of fiction ever written, so it is style rather than substance that connects the texts (unless there’s something here I fundamentally missed or failed to understand, potentially from that Tolstoy connection?).
One story is about a super rich trust fund type who tries to be the youngest person/woman/Brazilian to climb the highest mountains on all seven continents, but ends up losing both legs in a mountaineering accident; the second one is set deep in the Brazilian countryside and is about a landowner waiting to buy the neighbouring land, a failed hotelier, a young man with increasing memory loss, a middle aged man in a collapsing marriage who is drinking himself to death and mourning the death of his only child, which happened decades earlier; the third one is about a young woman and an ageing playwright working together to make a piece of theatre about a nineteenth century Russian painter living through a war in Sevastopol.
It’s a book about decisions and regrets, about reflection and contemplation, about memory and memorialising, about rewriting personal – and public – histories through creative acts. The mountaineer encounters a piece of video art either inspired by (or secretly made by) the much older documentarian-lover who was filming her peak-scaling and scarpered post-accident; the middle aged man in the countryside is retelling to anyone who will listen his attempts to find a guinea pig for a failed Peruvian ritual cleansing of his sick son, while the play in the final section of the book is not just an attempt to rewrite the life of its character, but also a botched effort to recontextualise the disappointing lives of its two creators (albeit one near its end and one still young and (maybe?) recoverable?)…
It’s a book about reality and realities, about self -mythologising and the equally facile dangers of mythologising others; it’s about seeking a sense of self but failing to analyse why one was absent in the first place. (Maybe the themes are more coherent across the text that I’d initially felt?)
Stylistically, the text veers from close third person perspective to other person’s close third person perspective, slipping from present to past via dialogue and into memory from experience. It’s neat, it’s clear, but it’s interestingly woven and far from simplistic. It’s a great short book, absolutely.
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Ok, just googled Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches and it is similarly a collection of three pieces of writing, but all are about Big T’s experiences living through the same Sevastopol war as did the artist in the play in the third story of Fraia’s book. It sounds interesting, though, maybe one day I’ll read that, too!
Order Sevastopol direct from Lolli Editions here
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