Sevastopol

by Emilio Fraia, Zoë Perry (Translator)

Sevastopol contains three distinct narratives, each burrowing into a crucial turning point in a person’s life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty, semiabandoned inn in the haunted depths of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers.

      Inspired by Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist, in a restrained manner reminiscent of the prose of Chekhov, Roberto Bolano, and Rachel Cusk.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Brazil, Literary Fiction, Portuguese Literature

90 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 2018

About the author

EMILIO FRAIA nasceu em São Paulo, em 1982. É autor de Sebastopol (Alfaguara, 2018, terceiro lugar no Prêmio da Biblioteca Nacional, finalista do Prêmio Jabuti e semifinalista do Prêmio Oceanos), de Campo em branco (Companhia das Letras, 2013, em parceria com o artista DW Ribatski) e de O verão do Chibo (Alfaguara, 2008, em parceria com Vanessa Barbara, finalista do Prêmio São Paulo de Literatura). Foi um dos autores selecionados para a coletânea Os melhores jovens escritores brasileiros da revista britânica Granta. Teve sua ficção publicada nas revistas The New Yorker, One Grand e nas coletâneas Passageways, da Two Lines Press, e Cuentos en tránsito, da Alfaguara, na Argentina. Foi premiado com uma Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship, tradicional programa de residência de escritores no Civitella Ranieri Center, na Itália, e selecionado para o The Shanghai Writing Program, da Associação de Escritores de Xangai. Escreveu para revistas como piauí, serrote, Trip, Vogue e Bravo! e para jornais como Folha de S.Paulo e O Estado de S.Paulo.

Reviews

[Mike E. Mancini]

I’m strapped for free time, writing is hard, I’ve no time this year to wrestle with words. Only to read.

This is a miniature masterpiece. A meticulous freewheeling gem of fiction containing three separate tales totaling 90 pages.

Borrow it or buy it, but please read it.

A translation of his next work is a day one get. I’m on board.

[Lealdo]

Acredito que a maior virtude desse livro seja que o Emilio Fraia se propôs a fazer sobretudo literatura, sem privilegiar as ciências humanas ou, pior, ideologias em detrimento da arte como tem acontecido tanto.

Ao mesmo tempo, ele é um homem branco cis, suponho que hétero. Literatura feita desse jeito seria então coisa de privilegiado? Um novo sinônimo para alienação? Torço veementemente que não.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

121st book of 2022.

This is a slim, very smoothly written book in translation from Brazilian writer Emilio Fraia. The structure is taken right from Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches, which I actually read earlier this year, using the three timeframes, December, May and August. I was drawn to Tolstoy's book, and subsequently, this book, because my great-grandfather was captured in Sevastopol in the Second World War. Beginning the book, it's easy to be confused and curious: why did Fraia use Tolstoy's book as his inspiration? The first of the three stories is about a woman's obsession with climbing Everset, the second about a missing person and the last deals with a stage play set in Sevastopol (at last). It's one of those short story collections that gets away with being a 'novel' because of unifying themes and less than discernible connections. What struck me on finishing is the failed ambition, loneliness and quiet sense of despair in all three parts, though I didn't feel as if this was enough to satisfyingly unify them. However, I did enjoy reading them, and it was short enough to read in a few hours throughout the day, half before Sunday dinner out in the town and the other half once I was home, a little sleepy and tipsy.

[Yuri Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three novellas concerned with alienation and impending loss.
The first deals with a young Brazilian woman, a budding mountaineer, who lost her legs in an accident on Everest. She has dealt with this by creating a public persona of someone who has overcome all the odds to “recover”; a highly paid speaker very active on social media. And yet, she is apparently so at variance from that persona she does not recognize herself in the documentary that created it.
The other two novellas are not ostensibly connected to the first (photographs in another room), except that, taking a lead from Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches, they are set in the same war zone of alienation and looming disaster.
Written with a clarity and pace that holds the reader’s attention in a natural, unstrained manner, this is a work I recommend to those who appreciate writers who take risks.

[Ruben · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too disjointed for my taste. Too many digressions. Perhaps I should have concentrate more, but I kept finding my mind wandering...

[Ben Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very, very interesting. These 3 stories are strange, moving and feel multi-layered and ambitious. A very small book that packs a punch. I am definitely going to read whatever else Emilio Fraia will publish that I can find in English.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fraia's stories are like vignettes into the lives of people who are themselves observing life passively; whether meditative, loitering, or simply unable to interact with or change the outcomes of events that they see.

Paperback from my place of work, Oxford Exchange Bookstore in Tampa, Florida.

[jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

our actions in life are not many. and then one day it's all over.

collecting three longish short stories (one of which appeared previously in the new yorker under a different name), sevastopol (sebastopol) is the first book-length work from brazilian writer emilio fraia to appear in english. each of the book's stories, "december," "may," and "august," though otherwise unconnected, convey a personal tale of loss, resignation, memory, change, and perhaps a frustrated yet ultimately undefeated hope. fraia is a talented storyteller (as evidenced by the tales his main characters tell too) and reading sevastopol is like listening to a friend relate a recent anecdote interesting in and of itself, but all the more so because it's told with a certain emotional weight or earned wisdom that makes you feel fortunate to hear it in the first place.

fraia has (so far) written three books (this being his third), including a co-written novel and a graphic novel. too, he was included in granta's best young brazilian writers issue (2012).

if you don't think, it's nothing much. it mostly comes from thinking.

*translated from the portuguese by zoë perry (souza leão, coelho, et al.)

3.5 stars

[Alejandro · Rating 3 out of 5]

A obra de Fraia tem elementos interessantes, mas que não chegam a resultar em um livro tão impactante quanto a orelha de "Sebastopol" julga.
Em três contos, a memória é elemento que une as diferentes histórias, bem como o exercício de seus personagens em contá-las, criando histórias dentro das histórias.
Falte, talvez, uma força maior em seus personagens, que, apesar de histórias interessantes (a exceção talvez seja a última), parecem não usar essa potência a seu favor, perdendo a essência das narrativas em uma espécie de esvaziamento literário, como se elaborar e descrever bem as características emocionais de seus protagonistas fosse mais fundamental que contar uma boa história.
Não é um livro ruim; Fraia demonstra boa parte de sua habilidade que tem chamado a atenção de publicações especializadas, mas creio que esta obra específica deixou a desejar quando se analisa o todo.

[Hayden J Amaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic collection of short stories, beautifully written.

Finished the last one on the beach in Rio, and despite the festive atmosphere, this book totally bummed me out and ruined my day.

Highly recommended.

[Clark Knowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a stretch to think of this book as a novel. It’s three (very, very) loosely linked, superb stories that can be read together or separately. Each story is a spare, concrete exploration of obsession, connection, loss, and longing. I’m looking forward to more translations of this author’s work.

[Bert Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Always interested to explore new authors in translation (to English)
Emilio Fraia , a Brazilian writer, presents 3 short stories as a group.

My favorite was December about a brave female climber determined to be the first Brazilian woman to summit the 7 highest mountains in the world. In a short span Fraia captures the climbing community and the media attention given to it. The story turns out differently than one might expect and conveys a range of emotions.

In all honesty the next 2 stories never captured my imagination.

[Felipe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Das estreias que 2018 trouxe, pouca coisa me pareceu tão impressionante quanto "Sebastopol", de Emilio Fraia, e uso impressionante porque não há outro termo cabível. Apesar de já ter colaborado num romance ("O verão do Chibo") com Vanessa Barbara e numa HQ ("Campo em Branco") com DW Ribatski, o compilado de três contos que leva o nome da histórica cidade russa soa não apenas como um novo batismo para o autor paulista mas também tem um vigor que reimagina a contemporânea literatura brasileira. De texto duro, discreto, e estranhamente virtuoso, Fraia associa suas breves histórias de trauma e ausência através de delicados fios sentimentais. Se não pensamos em termos de narratividade, "Sebastopol" é quase um romance, tamanha é a proximidade entre as intenções de suas personagens principais. É raro que uma leitura me deixe questões à porta da garganta, mas acontece. Felizmente, Emilio estava disponível para me responder algumas delas. https://osobressalto.blogspot.com/201...

[Sara Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is 3 loosely connected stories about failed ambition. i really enjoyed it! the translation was written so beautifully, and i was enthralled by each story.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to be an interesting and stimulating story. There are intertwining, parallel stories involved, questions about what a story actually is. What I most enjoyed about the story, was the beautiful writing and what seems to be an equally beautiful translation. On the other hand, it was more of an intellectually interesting story to me, as opposed to emotionally gripping, and my rating of 3 simply reflects that my personal taste in stories gravitates toward those with an emotional payoff. I'll be very curious how others rate this!

[Casey (ish-i-ness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. "December" was my favorite of the three, but they all explore questions of success and achievement, spiraling around relationships and interactions between people. I mean... Of course I liked it. I'm not sure I understand the connection to Tolstoy but I'm ok with that.

[Lara.reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

This is a book I randomly stumbled into at the library. It is such a mundane book telling three different stories in such a beautiful way. The characters were beautifully illustrated and I love how the stories were so subtly connected while they were so different. The writing was so confusing in a magnificent way that just made it interesting and exquisite.

[Sarah Ahmad · Rating 3 out of 5]

i like introspective and aloof books that seem to go nowhere but this one was a little too aloof for me. beautiful writing and a good, quick read, just not for me.

[Shankar Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Emilio Fraia’s debut collection of short-stories in English translated from Portuguese by Zoë Perry. Emilio Fraia is a Brazilian writer whose titular story appeared in the New Yorker a few years ago. This collection appears to be influenced by Tolstoy's THE SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES, which I have not read. Each of the three stories is named after a month—December, May, and August—and each one delves into a pivotal moment in a person's life. Three stories of people who worked hard yet eventually falling short.

In the first story, Lena, a climber who lost her legs in a tragic accident, writes to an unknown artist of a short film that is now playing in an art museum near her house. The video appears to depict her life, but in ways that cause her to doubt her lived experience, particularly her connection with Gino, a photographer who accompanied her on a trip to Everest. In the second narrative, an elderly couple stops at a run-down inn in the middle of nowhere, but the proprietor allows them to stay nonetheless. The woman departs after a week, while the husband remains there on his own for a few days before disappearing. In the last story, which is set in the book's title city of Sevastopol, Nadia, a young writer, quits her job to work on a play with a much older director who stalks young men to cast in his work.

I found these stories to be very surreal and devoid of any obvious significance. As though these stories were mocking the ontological essence of their existence. The writing is both poignant and ambitious. The translation is excellent. I'm excited to see what Emilio has to offer next. Highly recommended.

[Elizabeth]

wow, what an amazing debut… the first third was very uncomfortable in a panicky claustrophobic way, it almost turned me all the way off but i am so glad i stuck it out. the last part felt really transcendant and yet true to life, the most Rachel Cusk-ish part of the book. made me want to write!

[Nikos Dunno · Rating 3 out of 5]

All three stories had impressive starts but I felt, they cheated me of a good ending while not being very interesting in between either.

[Ragnar Bang Moe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Papirbok. Biblioteket. Norsk, bokmål. Boken har fått veldig god kritikk - jeg synes jo den var bra, men ikke fantastisk…

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing’s ever lost—
Things just disappear
An echo in your ear
That never fades;
Nothing’s ever lost—
Like a kiss upon your lips
Or when you lose your grip
And walk away;
And nothing’s ever really lost.

So begins “Nothing’s Ever Lost,” a beautiful song of great power by the longstanding Chicago rock band Eleventh Dream Day, featured, as it happens to be, on the ambitious and, frankly, astonishingly good 2021 album SINCE GRAZED, the band’s first in six years. As the truly legendary and partially Chaicago-based Mekons did in 2020 with their really, really terrific quarantine opus EXQUISITE, named for the Surrealist don’t-Bogart-that-quill parlour game a certain files-passed-about approach to the production of musical recordings cannot help but invoke, Eleventh Dream Day have produced a veritable Windy City Abbey Road and decided not to put in out on any physical format whatsoever, keeping the deal narrowed-in to the download sphere, as least for the time being, the bottom line being that a record obviously can’t be made to have feet when we don’t know when or if we are going to have a proper ground beneath us. Are we the Rainbow People upon the wistful subject of whom the great Nicholas Mosley was wont to rhapsodize in his final years, here together on an ethereal/ambrosial suspension bridge, mingling, but, like, between what and what other what? The three stories collected in SEVASTOPOL are interrelated very clearly at the level of thematics and reflexology, though the author intends, I believe, to draw attention to basic problems germane to both simple and complex relations (and interrelations), a matter given, arguably, elegant expression by way of the co-assembly of three discreet pieces. Emilio Fraia is a young writer and a very gifted one. SEVASTOPOL—evidently inspired by Tolstoy’s THE SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES, which I will contentedly confess to never having read—is Fraia’s third book, and maybe since he’s not even quite as old as my little sister, I can be excused for suggesting that this young fellow might be himself a bit of a perspicacious rainbow kid, dazzlingly en route to a place he will arrive at all the more dazzling, this being one of these things that only the course of time in her fullness can fully fulfill. Where does Emilio Fraia stand Re: The Subject: Yea of Nay: Nothing’s Ever Lost? We cannot strictly speaking say that he takes any position, though it does just so happen to be the case that Lena, inter-relationally spun and therefore somewhat spinning-top-like central intelligence of “December,” first of SEVASTOPOL’s three standalones, each named for a different month of the year, very much does take a position—in no uncertain terms. Lena doesn’t think anything lasts, she feels it all slipping away, but there is no poetic succor, the corrosive thread of meaning the last part to go (though corroding from the outset). This sort of thinking attracts its own spirals and will tend to gradually intensify. Where earlier a person may have believed merely that everything goes away and is in fact the totality of everything always going away permanently, now the same pitiful soul may find their self faced with the possibly paralyzing possibility that the past isn’t even real any more, and that we may have broken it by thinking about it. “The beauty of climbing is that it’s pointless. It has no meaning, it doesn’t hide a meaning, it’s a person and a wall—that’s it. At the time, I liked hearing that kind of thing, I’d even repeat it over and over, like those were my ideas, and deep down they were, because he seemed to be reading my thoughts. But eventually all that started to sound fake, too.” In the aftermath of reading SEVASTOPOL, a book split in three in which “the mountain” (or mere mountains) persistently appear(s), I spent a rainy day indoors revisiting a pair of cherished movies in a city known for its high altitude, the Rocky Mountains visible on a clear day. Nearby is Lake Louise, a rumoured planetary chakra. Forget about Lake Louise for a moment, we do not have the space to account for her. Movies. God loves movies. Not a lot of sun penetrating the cloud cover, it was a nice day to revisit Cronenberg’s adaptation of COSMOPOLIS, in which I take special note of a delicious line-reading—in a film I love above all, perhaps, for its abundance of these—care of the actress Emily Hempshire who, as the overworked and stressed-out single mother called into the back of Kid Zillionaire boss Robert Pattinson’s anonymous white limo as a “yuan carry” threatens to “burry us in hours,” only to be bombarded with a bizarre, outrageously concupiscient, uh, tirade from the boss who, leaning over her golem-like, grimacing, is having his prostate examined by an on-call physician. Quoth Hempshire, hilariously, both titillated and slightly aghast: “How come we have never spent this kind of time together?” The question betrays a realization consonant with that given expression in Lena’s escalating dread: this time is a different time from other times I have occupied; I suddenly see this and am also disconcertingly more aware than I’d like to be that just as I have lost my past experiences, I am presently losing presence. What is the first thing we lose? This might in fact be exactly as it was in the Eleventh Dream Day Song: “Like a kiss upon your lips / Or when you lose your grip / And walk away.” And what of this specific time spent with the elusive lover Gino, first introduced as an absencing presence not there in the video images that bring him back into play for Lena, and which would appear to take her a good deal further afield than she has ever previously been. “The image on the screen, a body on a stretcher—my body, in this case—instantly drew me in. It was a body in the middle of a green room that smelled of urine and medicine. I watched myself lying there, thousands of miles from home, and as much as I wanted to and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t move.” The Lena who is looking at the image is losing herself to the Lena she is seeing, whose distance from the Lena who is looking becomes greater and greater the more analytic pressure it has forced upon it, this I think increasingly representing the crux of the human condition in the 21st century, but definitely also consonant with the principle epistemological theme of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic BLOW-UP: the more you blow up an image, the more blur you are obliged to confront. This is a crucial contemporary theme! Not a week goes by that Netflix fails to release a true crime documentary testifying to the investigator’s abyssal pattern-formations and the collapse of explanatory narratives into particulate and granular dissolution. In one space-time, reflecting upon the horror of being inside thinking organic intimacies that made her say and feel things that were practically akin to infestation or diabolic possession, all grief, including that for the legs she lost on Mount Everest, is grief for the world Lena was making wrong, or wrong-making…and finally never making at all, because it was only ever being unmade at the speed of peril itself. Is Lena at all speaking for her author when she as a person she no longer is or meaningfully relates to says that Gino saying “The beauty of climbing is that it’s pointless” is the same as her saying it, essentially, though that campfire fire's long since been put out. The campfire to which I refer could only ever be directly entwinned with the fire memorialized in the teachings of the great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. Climbing the mountain. Or setting out, like take-no-shit Lena, to climb the tallest one on each of the seven continents. There is a lineage, but there is no straight line. In DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze conceptualizes a third synthesis of time, the abstract line, a “purely logical” time “beyond all duration.” An abstract line can be drawn pretty neatly from the earnest if ephemeral poetics of the climb born of the romantic-sexual (and exceedingly ephemeral) fusion of Lena-Gino, to the most bravura passage in the entirety of SEVASTOPOL, a lengthy paragraph from the collection’s second piece, “May,” which I cannot help but excerpt in its bold entirety: “Nilo looks up. Ahead, across the river, the lights come on in the house on Hermes' farm. Nilo crosses the bridge. On the mountain, he can see the machines at work, the machines that uproot, strip, and stack the eucalyptus. A mountain is our attempt to get closer to the gods. Like in Egypt, there were no mountains in many of the desert regions of Central America. That's why the Incas and the Aztecs needed to build the pyramids. To get closer to the gods. The gods, always the gods. In other regions, however, volcanoes made perfect pyramids. The highest ones were chosen as altars, where the Incas took offerings, performed their rituals and sacrifices. The Incas had their own way of mummifying. The ones chosen to be sacrificed were children. Because children were the only ones pure in heart and so would be entitled to see and speak with the gods. They were the transmitters of information from here to the cosmic world. Some children may have been chosen even before they were even born. For those civilizations, it was an honor to have a child sacrificed. It was a powerful thing, in spiritual terms. The process was simple. The Incas went up with the children to the top of the volcano. There, they gave them a mixture of hallucinogenic plants. The air up high is thin. It's very cold. The children would become drowsy, and hypothermia took care of the rest. Whenever one of these Inca child mummies is found, the preservation of their bodies is astounding. They look like they're asleep, like they could wake at any moment. On one volcano, almost seven thousand meters high, near Santiago, they found the southernmost mummy of the Inca period, El Niño del Plomo. And there are the Children of Llullaillaco, some of the most well-preserved mummies in the world. The oldest is known as the Inca Maiden and she was mummified when she was fifteen. The Lightning Girl, killed at seven, was found with burns on her face from a bolt of lightning that struck her on the mountain. The youngest, called the Boy, was three years old when he was offered up as a sacrifice to the gods of the pre-Columbian world.” Were the gods of the pre-Columbian world born of it, product of a collective undertaking, inscrutable and perhaps unconsciously occult, or largely unconsciously so? What is it that civilizations produce? Do they produce different kinds of time, and if so what kind of time are we producing? These questions are on Fraia’s mind as they are on the minds of many of us, I’m sure. Lena from “December” and Nilo from “May” very definitely represent opposing models or styles, less an ethics than an ethology in the sense that we are also before anything animals rather than the abstractions stratified by language (along with which we might have gotten some of the wrong kinds of time). Lena is the post-history who is losing sequence and coherence—the chronology and consistency that are the conditionals of historicity (and were once its enabling illusions)—and consistently seeking to build synaptic connections sufficient to stabilize the plane she currently occupies. She is addressing a woman she will come to believe is actually Gino, the male lover, the phantom integer who once made something add up, and she has previously accused this woman of inventing a fact that she, Lena, has herself previously presented as a fact (four orgasms in one night!). What causes Lena to go out and climb those mountains is the same thing that causes her to go on making the unmakeable world, this the process we call living. Lena at first calls it “some vague idea of isolation and overcoming.” I’d pay attention to her, were I you. “I don’t expect a reply, Gino. But I do wonder: what’s the difference between the story in this video of yours and the one I’ve told myself for so long? Is there even a difference, in the end?” Think of it this way: if there are actually Space Scientists from Sirius B looking down upon us, and if we are their entertainment in that sense that Ancient Greeks and Shakespeare, for example, have (sort of) found cause to suggest, wouldn’t they like the shows we put on for one another as much as or maybe even more than the show that we as social animals would constitute in aggregate? From the fire of Heraclitus we get the Greek word “semeiotikos” or semiosis, meaning a frenetic ongoing campfire-like process of communication through signs and symbols. Literary artists, doubtlessly beholden to the general Weltanschauung of both quantum mechanics and the increasing spectralization of electronic capital in the 21st century, increasingly find themselves seeking means to formalize immaterial entanglements that structurally entangle. Lena from “December” is making a Pascalian wager with respect to the production of new time, and if she loses all her kisses, more kisses she can have. Nilo from “May,” who knows his Heraclitus but persists in fixatedly drawing circles in the sand, sees identities and fields for identities to populate as interchangeable, and, having access to archives of which the Incas and the Aztecs could never have imagined, practices a shamanism at the limits of abstract time, but he has also emptied himself out into pure desert and will not be finding, I shouldn't suspect, any future kisses there. Of course, we have another curious model/style/example, from the final story, naturally, “August,” although what stands out crucially here for me is a couple layers deep. Still, let’s take a look, tossing out much in the way of contextualization. Well, truly, let me just enjoy my refusal here to contextualize at all. “What’s most fascinating, Klaus said, is the way Trunov was always breathing the leaden air of war—he was up to his neck in it—but war, the war itself, never appeared in his paintings.”

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three short stories, each one more moody, beautiful and enigmatic than the last

[Dan Terbush · Rating 5 out of 5]

All encompassing

[Alexandre Boide]

Livros que remetem a livros (tratando aqui só de ficção) pessoalmente me interessam porque fornecem múltiplas chaves de leitura – talvez não em um duplo como o “Quixote” de Pierre Menard, ou um doppelgänger como O Aleph engordado de Pablo Katchadjian, mas em relações um pouco mais distantes, como o fato de The Warriors, de Sol Yurick, ser livremente inspirado na Odisseia.

Sebastopol, de Emilio Fraia, é livremente inspirado em Contos de Sebastopol, de Liev Tolstói. Ambos são compostos de três histórias, com títulos praticamente idênticos. No caso de Tolstói, o tema é o cerco militar à cidade de mesmo nome na Guerra da Crimeia, da resistência à derrocada. No livro de Fraia, com seus personagens em uma espécie de desterro permanente e sujeitos a outros tipos de cercos e batalhas, essa questão é bem mais elusiva.

No primeiro conto, “Dezembro”, é possível encontrar uma simetria mais direta, com uma voz narrativa dirigida a um “você” e a menção a corpos destroçados e ao desejo de resistência. Mas, se por um lado os soldados retratados por Tolstói são submetidos à violência autoritária nos moldes dos impérios pré-1914 (“Nós morreremos, crianças, mas não cederemos Sebastopol!”), a protagonista de Fraia, que perde as pernas em um acidente na escalada do Everest, parece acossada pelo que o pensador sul-coreano Byung-Chul Han chama de “violência da positividade” (“a desmedida do positivo, que se expressa como superdesempenho e supercomunicação, como um hiperchamar atenção e hiperatividade”) – ela dá palestras, escreve, é obrigada a recorrer o tempo todo à narrativa exultante da superação do trauma.

Seguindo nessa chave de interpretação, “Maio”, a segunda narrativa, trata da força sufocante do cerco e da aparente futilidade da resistência, tanto em termos materiais como pessoais. Aqui, a força invasora é econômica (o dinheiro chega a ser citado por um personagem como “um tipo de energia”), e todos sabem que a rendição é mera questão de tempo. No plano pessoal, no entanto, ainda resta muito a ser resolvido, e é aí onde reside uma das características mais interessantes de Sebastopol: um intrincado jogo de histórias dentro de histórias.

“Agosto”, o último relato, trata da derrocada. Tanto no livro russo do século XIX como no brasileiro do século XXI, o que se tem são dois personagens (um mais velho, outro mais jovem) tentando fazer algo digno de nota antes de sair de cena. Na Crimeia de Tolstói, a busca pela grandeza é de caráter militar. Na Sebastopol transportada para São Paulo, a batalha é travada contra o próprio ato de narrar. Mas, se no contexto da guerra a derrota significa a morte, no âmbito narrativo essa rendição lança o final de Sebastopol de Emilio Fraia em um dos terrenos mais férteis da ficção contemporânea: o impasse.

[Päter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tog en bok på måfå. Baserade valet på författarens ursprung (Brasilien) och titeln syftar ju på en stad på den sorgligt aktuella Krimhalvön. Jag tycker mig se ett tydligt sydamerikansk arv apråkligt och tematiskt, inte minst vissa element som är typiska hos den magiska realismen. Boken består av tre berättelser. En berättelse handlar om en bergklättrare som får se "sin" historia skildrad på film, om det nu är hennes. En annan om en ensam man på den Paruanska (eller om det är Brasilien) landbygden som är med om ett möte och ett försvinnande som får honom att tänka på sin, eller är det kanske vännens, historia. Den tredje berättelsen handlar om en ung författare som tillsammans med en avdankad regissör utifrån ett porträtt sätter upp ett drama om en soldat som under 1800-talet slås i Krimkriget. Berättelserna går ihop på det sättet att det genomgående temat är berättelser och berättande, ofta med ett metalager eller en osäkerhet med perspektivet. Med det tror jag boken vill säga att det inte spelar spå stor roll vem det är som berättar något, för, som en karaktär säger i boken "alla människors historier är en och samma".
Men, berättelserna är inte riktigt så sprakande som det låter, även om det glimrar till ibland av sublimitet. Jag får en känsla av tristess och otillfredsställande. Det är också något som skaver med språket, det är som hackigt och omständligt, och jag får läsa om flera gånger. Kan det vara översättningen? Vissa uttryck och ord återkommer ofta, som liknelsen "terrakottafärgad" om människor. Vet inte vad det ska betyda. Rödbrun?

[Javier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual Rating 3.5/5

I don't have too much to say about this book. I didn't really expect anything going into it because I had never heard anything about it before; I just picked it up from some random book shop I was in. I think overall it was ok. I think the first two stories were a little confusing and hard to follow. For the first one, it was really confusing what was true or not about the story that was being told cause it was being told from her perspective, but then at the end, it seemed like it was a movie or something?? Not too sure about that. For the second story, it was just really confusing what was going on with the guest who was staying at the hotel? Like how do we know he was missing and then there was the page where the hotel owner said that he like came back or something? Idrk what was going on there but the vibes were interesting. However, the last story was a masterpiece. Something about it really spoke to me and I really enjoyed it. I almost gave the book overall four stars just for the last story. I settled on 3.5 though because on the back it says that the stories in the book are connected, it does say subtly though, and I found like no connection. I tried to look back through the stories and think of literally anything that tied them together but there was nothing. Maybe that in two of the stories the city of São Paulo is mentioned but that's it. So that was a little disappointing but yea overall it was just kinda like eh okay.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“For a moment, I was afraid that everything would be forever crystallised in those scenes.” In Emilio Fraia’s Sevastopol, a book of three stories translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry, narrative and memory are amongst the chief thematic concerns. Three stories with wildly different plots and characters, all touch upon the same notions about storytelling and the self — the stories we tell, who we tell them to and what we hope to get out of them. The first narrator professes that “I did what people do all the time. Tell stories, retell them, freeze them in time, try to make sense of them.” The second story, whose narration shifts slightly throughout, contains the opinion that “we tell and repeat these stories because we’re afraid of them. That’s what it is, really. A cry for help. We want someone to help us, to protect us from them.” And finally the third story notes that “People always tell the same stories, even when they try to tell new stories.” This sense of inescapability defines these stories, of the dangers of obsession and pride for a young woman who wants to climb Everest; of a man who goes missing in body after being missing in spirit for some time; of a woman who works with a bad playwright on a bad play, unsure as to why, or what she’s doing with her life in general. A great narrative control, a dexterity with image and voice, underpin Fraia’s prose, his stories “the repository of a place in time.”

[Bhole Vishwakarma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. It has a sad tone sometimes i like to indulge in. Like The Secret History and A Separate Peace. Also, a lesson how one can create stories out of just anything like he writes in the first and the third stories that almost all stires are same and many a time we tell the same stories over and over again. Like he writes in one of the stories,“People always tell the same stories, even when they try to tell new stories. Stories are laid out in front of us, like objects, and over time we realize that they’re all made of the same material, a solid mass of stone and metal.”

There are other some deep musing:

“For a moment, I was afraid that everything would be forever crystallized in those scenes. Like a travel diary: when we write in a diary, what we remember from the trip — years later, when we read those words — has less to do with the trip itself than with what we’ve jotted down in the diary."

“When asked how he coped, one of the thousands of soldiers maimed in the Crimean War said: the chief thing is not to think. If you don’t think, it’s nothing much. It mostly all comes from thinking. ”