Reviewed by Ilze Duarte
Women in Brazil have long faced verbal and physical abuse by males, both strangers and the men in their lives. As a teenager and young woman in São Paulo, I was often a target of street harassment. As a child, I witnessed domestic violence in my own home. The rates of femicide in Brazil have reached shocking levels, and the past few months have seen a growing popular movement to denounce and combat these heinous crimes, with women and men taking to the streets in protest in cities around the country. Artists in film, TV, music, and literature have also called attention on social media and the press to this urgent crisis.
The publication this month of Amanda Sarasien’s translation of Springtime in the Bones by Állex Leilla is, then, uncannily timely. This disquieting novel, published in Brazil in 2011, adds a powerful voice to the millions of Brazilians who are saying no to misogyny and crimes against women. In that sense, Leilla’s work is in conversation with Claudia Melo’s novel The Simple Art of Killing Women, translated by Sophie Lewis, about violence against women in the Amazon, ranging from emotional to physical and sexual abuse to murder, and with Tatiana Salem Levy’s novel Vista Chinesa, translated by Alison Entrekin, about a woman who is raped in her hometown of Rio de Janeiro. Based on true stories and well-researched and documented cases, these are essential works in Brazilian literature, and thanks to their translators, in world literature today.
Állex Leilla’s Springtime in the Bones follows the journey of Luísa, a successful professional in the city of Salvador, Bahia, in the aftermath of the terror she suffered at the hands of two men who robbed her, beat her, and raped her. Luísa is filled with rage and a thirst for revenge. She doesn’t trust the police to find the culprits because she knows they may make an arrest, whether or not they have caught the perpetrators, merely to boost their solve rate. And even if the perpetrators are caught, Luísa doesn’t trust the notoriously slow court system in Brazil to deliver justice. She decides to take it into her own hands.
Luísa’s brother supports her plan for revenge, while her ex-husband, Michel, who is still a close friend, tells Luísa she should put the event behind her, forgive and forget. Michel’s belief that Luísa should forgive stems from the lessons of Christianity, still predominant in Brazil: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek. Michel also believes that forgetting the attack would allow Luísa to begin to heal. And here we have the crux of the narrative: How does a woman heal from such a harrowing experience? Is there a right way to go about it? What support does she receive? From whom? Is it desirable or even possible to forgive? To forget?
After the assault, Luísa is in deep pain not only over the violence she has suffered but also over the end of her marriage. Michel had left her and been away for some time. Now that he is back in Salvador, Luísa needs his company for a chance at coming back to life from what felt like a freezing of her body and soul. In the following passage, Luísa envisions the type of interaction with Michel that would bring her comfort. The interweaving of the colloquial and the lyrical here is rendered expertly by Sarasien:
If she could be face to face with him, comment on any ridiculous thing–not on the pain, not now–surround herself with trivialities, thoughts on spring, on espresso with cream, on the correct temperature for red wine, on smoking or not smoking menthol cigarettes, on the weather in Salvador. Something almost like an almond leaf in the wind: light in its reddish indentations, useless in its original function. She read somewhere and still remembers that friends, true friends, need only closeness, not substance or confessions. They need only shoot the breeze, come within an inch of each other’s heart, but not enter, remain on the outside, like guards who tell stories to cheat dawn. (20)
Luísa and Michel do indeed talk for hours, engaged in conversations that author Leilla labels the “cycles,” circular musings in which Luísa brings up movies, rock songs, books, philosophy, religion, national and international affairs. She expounds on various topics, often expressing outrageous opinions, sometimes not making much sense. Luísa’s rants exasperate Michel, who nevertheless comes back for more circular conversations, drinks, and music to be with her and to support her. The rants also carry Luísa through this period of tumult and loneliness. Even as Michel’s company provides some solace, Luísa is ultimately alone in her experience and feelings.
The utter aloneness of a woman who has been raped is one of the themes of Tatiana Salem Levy’s Vista Chinesa. Like all women who report the crime, both Julia, the protagonist-narrator of Vista Chinesa, and Luísa must relive their trauma through the physical exam, the questions asked by the police, the moment when they are asked to identify the attacker. Even as Julia relates the story in letters to her children and thus seeks connection with them, she remains alone in her experience, her words a necessary means of reaching out to her loved ones but imperfect as an expression of her pain.
Leilla builds her story from Luísa’s (and Michel’s) recollections, thoughts, and feelings in nonlinear fashion. The shifts between timeframes and the cyclical conversations reflect Luísa’s emotional turmoil and the obstacles that memory poses, with its lapses and defense mechanisms, to the retrieval of what is too painful to remember. In some cases, these emotions are compounded further by the guilt experienced by women, like Levy’s Julia, over what they might have done differently, how they might have prevented the assault. Luísa, however, rejects such feelings and chooses instead to respond to her horrific assault with action: an act of revenge. She seems comfortable with her choice. Over time, she moves on and finds renewal, a springtime of sorts.
Springtime in the Bones is also an exploration of love: the fierce love Luísa and Michel feel for each other. Leilla guides the reader through the complexities of their love as teenage friends, lovers, and former lovers through the use of close third-person narration and long stretches of dialogue that show us Luísa and Michel’s relationship in its raw state, largely unmediated. This allows Leilla to explore highly emotional topics—sexual assault, justice and injustice, the end of romantic love—with tremendous honesty and poignancy, at times with humor, not once with sentimentality.
Voice is paramount in this novel, and translator Amanda Sarasien has fully captured it. In this passage, we hear Luísa’s wit, verbal prowess, and unfailing ability to annoy Michel. We hear Michel’s exasperation but also his willingness to continue to engage with Luísa, to remain in his best friend’s life, to offer his support when she needs it most:
“Well, the truth is that I began so randomly, I mean, so beholden to my own navel, that, suddenly, this conversation loses all sense… What can I tell you? I began and I’m up to my neck in this morass. Did I say morass? It’s a very sexualized word. It even sounds like a double entendre… I hate that. We can think of another… The problem is that I don’t really feel like picking and choosing words, my head is hurting…”
“Don’t choose. You’re getting sidetracked… I hate how you’re always going off on tangents…”
“Okay. I’ll try to stick to the subject. Let’s forget the right words. That’s how it was, I’m coming to it. The solution. In the sense of that which is planned but not entirely desired, you see? It was happening. My thirst for revenge, which you might call justice, or the other way around: my thirst for justice, which you will call revenge. Whatever. I mean: it’s all so old and tired, I don’t know if it’s worthwhile… You’ll disapprove of what I’m saying, I know it…”
“Don’t mind me, go on.” (5)
Notice the use of “morass” in this passage. To “I’m up to my neck,” her translation of “atolada até o pescoço,” Sarasien adds “in this morass,” a brilliant choice, as it preserves the double entendre and fits with Luísa’s irreverence perfectly. This is only one of the many instances of highly effective solutions Sarasien has created to meet the translation challenges presented by Leilla’s text, teeming as it does with plays on words and cultural references.
Luísa’s pursuit of revenge is likely to be disturbing to readers, as it was to me. But I hope they will appreciate, as I do, Állex Leilla’s decision to create a female character who doesn’t wither after the violence that is perpetrated against her, who refuses to be meek and intimidated. Springtime in the Bones compels us to question why as a society we accept violence in men but abhor it in women. Why we expect survivors of violence to forgive and forget such horrible attacks, while justice through the legal system remains so hard to come by. While the cities women call home and contribute to don’t offer them safety and protection in return.
Leilla, Állex. Springtime in the Bones. Translated by Amanda Sarasien. Foreshore Publishing, 2026.
Ilze Duarte is a Portuguese-to-English literary translator. She is a recipient of the 2024 Sundial Literary Translation Award with her translation of Marilia Arnaud’s story collection The Book of Affects, published by Sundial House that same year. Her translations appear or are forthcoming in Asymptote Journal, Columbia Journal, Deep Vellum’s Best Literary Translations 2026, La Piccioletta Barca, Latin American Literature Today, MAYDAY Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Words Without Borders, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. More information about her translation work can be found on her website: https://www.ilzeduarteliterarytranslator.com.