Sevastapol by Emilio Fraia (tr. Zoë Perry)
Review by Jess Moody
‘People always tell the same stories, even when they try to tell us new stories. Stories are laid out in front of us, like objects, and over time we realise that they’re all made of the same material, a solid mass of stone and metal.’
It is over 160 years since Leo Tolstoy penned Sevastopol Sketches: three narratives set across the Crimean War’s bloody siege in December, May, and August, of 1854-55. These snapshots from the front line were striking in their realism, their form, their exacting exploration of individual ambitions and fears in the most deadly and banal circumstances.
Centuries forward, and across the world, Brazilian writer Emilio Fraia takes more than inspiration from the Sketches: his three narratives echo back and forth, in conversation with its themes, but also insistent in the question of whether one can ever tell where one story ends and another begins.
In Fraia’s ‘December’ there is no war. Instead, seemingly a freshness and calm: beach scenes, an empty gallery, a deserted driveway. We are in Brazil, with a young mountaineer who has survived a life-changing accident. Her voice is modern, firm, confident. Yet there are nods to the literary legacy here, if you know where to look. She disarms us with a second person address; there are mirrored images of bandages and amputation of limbs, narrative, relationships, certainty. We see the same motivations to search out extremes as in Tolstoy’s officers -perhaps pride, perhaps fame, perhaps the expectations of others. The sparse, careful prose (a knowing, grounded translation by Zoë Perry) hides shifting truth. Memories are cut up and re-edited like the video footage that our mountaineer watches and remembers – which she may or may not be in. It may, or may not, be her story.
She vanishes. ‘May’ is seemingly another narrative entirely. We are far from anywhere, in an inn that never really opened, as a middle aged man empties the swimming pool in search of a body. Fraia turns from film to oral history: and the story within story is the drunken anecdotes of a stranger, relayed on unplayed tennis courts. Personal tragedies are folded amongst the social turmoil of Peru and Brazil, full of the regrets of age, loneliness, and sickness. Tolstoy’s ‘May’ contrasts bloody streets with white flags, dancing with détente. Fraia too makes the centre of his triptych a space of waiting; the interim before the fall. What corpse will be carried home? What is it to learn the life of characters who are already vanishing? Can a man leave behind only his story?
In ‘August’ we are back to the city, and youth, and crappy wages and break-up fallout. Looping in yet another narrative art, the author focuses in on fading dramatist Klaus, who invites young Nadia to help with research for his play (based on a vague misunderstanding that she has an ‘interest in Russia’). In this third story Fraia introduces the Sevastopol siege itself as subject matter through the life and artificial brushstrokes of a wartime artist. Klaus and Nadia’s relationship becomes consumed by questions of plot, character, casting, what they need from each other, and the weight of a pause. ‘August’ offers us few conclusions, a tale and two lives meandering, constructing and failing.
Fraia’s prose is at turns meditative, mournful, and dreamlike; both a detached voiceover commentary, and a rough confession of disappointed desires. In the short, sharp sentences there is humanity, but little judgement. Things happen. Decisions are made. People hurt each other, and are hurt in return. The characters were there, now they are here, or they are gone. There may or may not be connection between…well, anything. Stories are told and re-told, and talk to each other. At the fall of Sevastapol, Tolstoy’s soldiers and sailors stare back at their lost city with incomprehension. Fraia is confident enough to let the seasons turn, and the pages turn with them; to layer together the glimpses of moments and memories for your interpretation, and your own meaning.
‘He used to paint figures and set them aside, then arrange them against backgrounds he’d prepared separately. So, even when the figures interacted with one another, the connection between them seemed unnatural. Their eyes…almost never seemed to meet...’