The Book of Emotions

by João Almino, Elizabeth Jackson

Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions "a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera." Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. Joao Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.

Genres: Fiction, Brazil, Novels, Literature

230 pages, Hardcover

First published January 17, 2012

Reviews

[Farhan Khalid · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the habit of carrying a camera over my shoulder to record whatever crossed my path

To photograph is to see with a trained eye, to crop and keep what one sees

Upon taking the picture, the photographs became engraved in my mind

They are eternal instants, frozen in a personal museum

I shall open this museum

It will be my legacy

To best see a photograph, you have to close your eyes

I blindly penetrate into the realm of images

Each person contributes his own dose of stupidity to the stupidity of the world

My problem was seeing too much

I saw everything going on around me down to the smallest details

The visible was real and the real was visible

I think of photography as an infinite alphabet of images that creates a visual language of the world

Night fell, relentlessly, without pity or forgiveness

I wanted once again to explore Brasília’s lunar landscapes, its feminine lines and crimson hues

Brasília aroused the rustic fields with green caresses

I rediscovered in it the sensual and audacious wide-ranging poetry

These days culture is image

The entire world makes and remakes itself in movies and photographs

And television has the power to bewitch

People — an abstract and indistinct mass

Each photograph is associated with the smile that I imagined on her face

The words that I heard from her mouth and the smell and delicacy of her hands

The day was fading in its slow faint

During those hours, I always fell in love with the landscape

Everything became beautiful

It’s the photograph of an undefinable late-afternoon emotion, with no meaning

I’d close my eyes and no kiss could be more real, no lips more sensitive, impassioned flesh one for another

I could photograph to record our imaginary embrace

Everything starts somewhere

The charge of desire contained in the image

Anyone who can’t sense her absence in that photograph or hear my heartbeats thinks it’s just a peaceful postcard landscape

Maybe she had wanted me as much as I wanted her

But nothing had ever happened between us beyond an exchange of languid looks and words of affection

She never stopped smiling while telling me the story of her life in short chapters

Here’s proof that photography can store whole conversations and unique moments that are dear to us

Rationality was prudent, patient, calm, and gentle

Madness was intense, impassioned, and violent

More real than the violence is living with the fear of violence without ever facing danger

If the violence doesn’t seem real to you – Maybe it’s just a question of probability

What’s the most improbable thing that ever happened to you? – You appearing in my life

Photography is the only art that requires a concrete, real object before it

More than cinema

The essence of photography is to represent reality

An instantaneous, fleeting, and sometimes deceptive reality

The fact is that you can doubt a story or a painting but no one doubts a photograph

If it shows something it’s because that thing was there, it was real at least for that moment

There’s where you’ll feel the people’s drama

Behind each photograph, a tragedy

A mixture of cruelty and poetry

Blindness has the advantage of composing beauty with more elements than mere physical appearance

Whose outlines are traced by touch, which feels the object more closely than sight

I like to hear her voice and imagine her figure

Unfulfilled desire causes suffering, and every fulfilled desire is replaced by another

But there’s no escape, my friend

Life fluctuates between suffering and boredom

You’ve chosen suffering

If you manage to free yourself from your desires, it will be boredom

Reality is a void, the ultimate nature of things

Reality doesn’t exist

He lived through his reading, through other people’s stories

I felt all-powerful

It was no exaggeration to believe that my photography could help create the past, history itself

Chance doesn’t exist

Everything is foreseen and everything will happen

It’s a matter of time

What isn’t revealed today will be revealed later

The book already exists in its entirety in eternity and the word that hasn’t been spoken yet will be spoken one day

Evil can turn into good and good into evil

If we don’t live today, we’ll live some day

Intimacy had put an end to the enchantment of our relationship

Her soul wouldn’t be made of crystal or cotton as I wrote days ago, but of an ember that ignites

I’d be there to feel the heat of that fire

The art of photography is to capture the moment in which the characters’ expressions and their body language reveal something of their personalities

I’d grown tired of looking for meaning in meaningless things

I didn’t expect anything from life or love

I didn’t even hope to overcome life’s emptiness or escape the void

Even so, this situation didn’t leave me melancholic

But rather relieved and combative

Ideological differences today count for little

The urgent problems are hunger, disease, and ignorance

I have spent a lot of time lying down, listening to noise from the neighbors and smelling the odors coming in through the window

Age doesn’t have its own virtues

It affects each person differently

It’s precisely when we learn to live that we have to bid farewell to life

Neutral images don’t exist, because photography captures only the passing moment, which can never be repeated

It’s possible to measure a woman’s passion in her eyes

She captured my insecurity in that afternoon’s transparent air

What touches our hearts stays fixed in our memory

The rest is trash

Pleasure isn’t measured by time but rather by intensity

I don’t want to cure the pain of yesterday with today’s fantasies

I’ll never forget those days of waiting and agony

Words to describe profound pain will always be insufficient

Life is just what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans

September 11 – It’s intolerance against intolerance

The landscape was created out of the shapes and colors of doubt, promise, frustration, guilt, and also love

So many are the names of pain — abandonment, egotism, scorn, bitterness

A photo is measured also by its ability to portray its subject in the truest, most accurate manner

Without faith the energy won’t work

Have faith and you will be cured

I had lost something irreparable, unique, and irreplaceable

I had the sudden realization that Brasília had changed in its most minute details

The entire universe had been dyed gray

A reality with an inhuman face that I could portray with much more life and richness

A photograph of a lie

Chance has its mysterious ways

Let’s talk facts: the world isn’t rational

In matters of culture, nothing is definitive

Happiness is a highly contagious virus

Nature can be entirely represented by triangles, rectangles, and circles

It doesn’t seem correct to abandon certain characters in the middle of the story

But what can we do when they disappear in real life?

My life was made of small failures and missed opportunities

Not for what I was able to accomplish but for what I didn’t achieve

Blurry photograph proves the hypothesis of an optical unconscious

Desire had made me suffer, because we want what we don’t have

Photography stops time and can retain feelings so that they can be relived in memory

Brasília. Inside me I felt the weight of its drama, intrigues, contrasts, its chaos

I saw myself as a fool who wanted to recover Brasília’s myth and utopia

Its beauty and dream of equality

I kissed the silver heart she gave me

I like rituals

These days I recognize houses by their smells

The driving forces of my life were pure winds, but strong winds

There will always be an open wound in our relationship

I felt we agreed on the basics

We’re imperfect and for this reason incapable of erasing our resentments

But we forgave each other

[Chad Post · Rating 3 out of 5]

João Almino’s _The Book of Emotions_ is the prototypical Dalkey Archive book. Not that all of Dalkey’s books are the same, but there is a certain set of criteria that a lot of their titles have—and which Almino’s novel has in spades:

1) It’s a book about someone trying to write a book.

From _Mulligan Stew_ to _At Swim-Two-Birds_ to _The Journalist_, this is a set-up that runs through a lot of Dalkey’s titles. In this case, Cadu, a former photographer is constructing a memoir about his life in Brasília out of some of his old photos. The text alternates from his personal “current moment” 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 “The Book of Emotions.”

2) The main character’s life didn’t turn out the way he had hoped.

If you’ve never read the “Letters to the Editor” from the back of the _Review of Contemporary Fiction_, 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_, 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’t have his share of women—it seems like he’s slept with everyone—but that never seems to work out either: the boy he fathered doesn’t know him and is in prison, the woman he marries dies tragically young, etc.

3) The protagonist has mental or health issues.

This is true of most every book in the world, but in keeping with the sad sack people who write into _RCF_ with their problems, Cadu is blind and pretty much bed ridden. His best days are behind him, and he’s trapped with just the memories of his life, loves, and pictures. Which brings up the fourth key aspect to a “typical” Dalkey book . . .

4) The narrative works by illustrating the strangenesses of the character’s way of thinking.

A perfect example of this is _Iceland_ 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_ falls into that general grouping, with the one difference that, although the entire text consists of Cadu’s thoughts and reactions to what goes on around him, the book doesn’t quite come together with the panache and humor that is evident in the examples above. There is something intriguing about _The Book of Emotions_, but unfortunately, it’s not the narrator’s voice.


What I like about this book is its overall structure—the parallel times, the numbered sections each centered around a particular (unseen) photograph—and the fact that it’s set in 2022 in Brasília and is part of Almino’s “Brasília Quintet.” (_Five Seasons of Love_, which is available from Host Publications features one of the characters from this novel, and the forthcoming _Free City_ is part of this series as well.) There are some moving moments in this book, but on the whole it’s a relatively sterile, exacting depiction of a man’s life and missed opportunities.

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

"When Joana and I discovered that we couldn’t have children, we didn’t undergo the tests to determine whose problem it was. That impossibility was a blessing: we didn’t want to have children. However, it was unlikely the infertility was mine because many years before in Brasília another woman had conceived my child."

That “another woman had conceived my child” is just so stiff . . . One other example of where I think the voice in this book falls short from one of the sex scenes:

"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’t to be outdone. She dominated that rich vocabulary better than I did and she wasn’t intimidated, as if she’d had experience with phone sex."

This isn’t to write off Almino—I think he’s one of the most interesting Brazilian writers working today, and I’m looking forward to reading more of his titles. (Especially _Where to Spent the End of the World_.) I just went into this with high hopes—see list above and my belief that this would be a very Dalkeyish Dalkey book—and 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_ it.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

nice novel of brasilia, a city that has come a long way from its inception in the highland plateau boonies to another brazilian megalopolis with many many poor folks looking for THEIR middle class. but the story really isn't about brasilia, though the city is a sort of character too, with its technocrats and politicians, its superquadras, pilot plan, north wing and south lake. its garden of salvation, its flowers. cadu is a photographer who has gone blind and in his oldish age decides to write a book using his photographs (which he can recall to a t) as the chapters. he also comes to the realization that memories are hard to recall but the emotions they encompassed one can recall "picture perfectly". so we hear him going over his life in brasilia, his loves, hates, screwups, his sex, his bachelorhood, his marriage that lasted just a few days, his unclaimed son in prison, his major and only exhibit of flowers and triangles (women's triangles), big walls of photos arranged tastefully. it was not a hit.
is it true that the emotions we had/have are more powerful than our recall of acts, faces, smells, happenings? maybe perhaps our shame felt most intrudes, even when not wanted, more than the glowing golden 'perfect' times? good addition to dalkey archive.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Starts off promisingly: blind writer recalls photos he has taken and the memories behind them. Swiftly lurches into dirty old man territory with numerous one-dimensional women 'opening' for him and painfully little plot to speak of. Avoid.

[Ernest · Rating 3 out of 5]

Metafiction with an air of Brasilia. Reminds me a bit of Coetzee's Slow Man - photography mingles with meditations on mortality, but this one's a lot more sensual. I didn't care much for the plot here.

[Sigrun Hodne · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some very beautiful paragraphs in this text - but unfortunately there is not enough of them to make a really great book.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unique tale of an old photographer looking back on his love affairs and his work through his photos. I found it a bit challenging to keep track of all the characters (so many women!), but the story is well-conceived and downright poetic at times.

[Daniel Palevski · Rating 5 out of 5]

really enjoyed this... couldn't wait to get back to it day after day and finished it in like five days.

[William Akin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit quirky, quite beautiful, and kind of pervy. Everything i look for in a Dalkey Archive offering.