Marília Arnaud, a celebrated author from João Pessoa, Brazil, has penned three novels and four short story collections. Her work has garnered her numerous awards, including the prestigious 2021 Kindle Prize in Literature for her novel O Pássaro Secreto, chosen from 2,400 original works. The Book of Affects showcases Arnaud’s profound ability to explore the darker sides of the human psyche, and its English translation won translator Ilze Duarte the 2024 Sundial House Literary Translation Award.
I devoured The Book of Affects in one sitting during a three-hour plane flight. Rooted deeply in psychological realism, Arnaud’s expertly-paced stories delve into themes of death, betrayal, illicit affairs, and violence. Yet, they are not without moments of tenderness. Laced with suspense and emotional intensity, Arnaud’s writing evokes the interiority of Clarice Lispector and features plot twists worthy of Edgar Allan Poe, consistently delivering surprising endings.
Arnaud’s skill in breathing life into a diverse cast of characters is remarkable. Eight of the nine stories in the collection are narrated in the first person (three by women, four by men, and one by a boy), with two using the second person. The ninth story shifts to third-person narration but closely mirrors the female protagonist’s perspective. This ability to shift between narrative voices, perspectives, and genders is no small feat; many writers favor a particular voice or gender, but Arnaud’s are distinct, both linguistically and psychologically.
In “Flesh and Agony,” a woman reflects on a violent love affair; “The Night of Alicia” reunites a man with the cousin he spied on as a teenager. “Sunflowers in Hell” follows a woman who buries her husband and embarks on a quest to find the person who was with him when he died. In “The Man Who Came from a Dream”—the most Poe-esque story, and the only one in third person—a girl dreams of being held captive by a stranger, only to encounter him again in real life. “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” examines family dynamics and an illicit love affair, while “Broken Crystal” tells of a girl who delivers a letter and uncovers a grisly truth. In “Not Even the Stars Are Forever,” a boy contemplates his mother’s terminal illness and her fraught relationship with his abusive father. Lastly, “Açucena” portrays a man’s descent into jealousy—“secret sewers running through me”—as he plots a way out of his own misery.
In “The Passenger” (my favorite and the most surreal), a mysterious woman climbs into a man’s car and sends his life skidding onto an entirely new—or perhaps old—trajectory. The man is on his way home to have a quick shower before taking his wife Una out to dinner, as he does once a week, but the stranger that installs herself in his car at a set of traffic lights acts as though they have a long history together. He is certain that she must be mad or have mistaken him for someone else, but her insistence inspires in him a mixture of repulsion and attraction. He is anxious to get home to his wife without delay, avoiding a night of interrogation and days of silent treatment, but something compels him to ask the woman—who he doesn’t even find attractive—if they can meet up at another time.
Instead of being offended by his apparent lack of recognition, she slides over and places her hand on his crotch. He stops the car and she sits astride him, begging, “Please, do it the way I like it, the way we always did it.” Then she pushes him away, asking why he abandoned her and their son and how he had been able to forget all the years they spent together. Seeing his confusion, she pulls a photograph out of her purse and shows it to him. He sees himself beside the woman and a rosy-cheeked baby, wearing a t-shirt that his wife Una had given him and a ring that was a present from his father. Even the scar on the chin matches his own from a childhood horse-riding accident.
His resolve to get home to his wife crumbles and he drives the woman home—to a house just like one he had wanted to buy in the past, before his wife talked him out of it—and there he realizes that he knows where to find the key to the front door. I won’t spoil this entirely by telling you how it ends, but I will say that I loved the dreamlike to-and-fro of this story, as one is forced to constantly reformulate their theory about what is going on with every new paragraph.
While there are no happy endings here, the writing in The Book of Affects is exquisite and utterly gripping, brought to visceral life in English in Duarte’s sure-handed translation. Fans of psychological thrillers and literary fiction will find themselves captivated by Marília Arnaud’s masterful storytelling.
Arnaud, Marília. The Book of Affects. Translated by Ilze Duarte. Sundial House, 2024.
Alison Entrekin has translated many of Brazil’s beloved and iconic novels, including Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, Paulo Lins’s City of God and Chico Buarque’s Budapest. Her honours include the 2019 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize & PEN medallion for her body of work, the AAWP Translator’s Prize, and an ALTA Travel Fellowship, as well as shortlistings for the PEN America Translation Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her new translation of João Guimarães Rosa’s classic Grande Sertão: Veredas, will be published as Vastlands: the Crossing in 2026 by Simon & Schuster USA and Bloomsbury UK.