“Sevastopol”
by Emilio Fraia
from the December 16, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
Emilio Fraia is a Brazilian writer who was on Granta magazine’s 2012 list, “The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists” (see here). I was reading and writing about those stories for a bit in 2012 and 2013 before I apparently stopped . . . right before Fraia’s story, “A Temporary Stay.” While I think I read it, I’m not sure. I’m coming to this story with no sense of Fraia’s other work.
He has one novel, O verão de Chibo (2008), and one graphic novel, Campo em Branco (2013), to his name (though I don’t think either have been translated into English) and a 2018 collection of three stories, Sebastopol, from which “Sevastopol” is taken. This collection is slated to be published by New Directions in 2021.
I’m intrigued by this collection of stories (and, therefore, by “Sevastopol”) because Fraia suggests he took his inspiration, in part, from Tolstoy’s collection of three stories called Sevastopol Sketches. Fraia, for his part, doesn’t necessarily set this story in Sevastopol; rather, we are in São Paulo amongst the less well-to-do theatre people, who “will flatter you to your face and stick a knife in your back, that’s a fact.” Our narrator is a woman named Nadia, and she has met a director she “got a good vibe from.” This is Klaus, a rather eccentric individual. When the story begins, Nadia shares a story she’s written, one about a woman named Nadia. “I asked Klaus whether he thought it might work onstage. He said that it was a lousy story and clearly nothing about it worked.”
The next sentence is also the beginning of a new section: “I think Klaus took a shine to me.”
I think this is developing into an interesting story, and I’m anxious to get deeper! Please let me know your thoughts!
A very intellectual meta short story about the nature of stories. Some Borges, some Tolstoy, some Rayuela. I read it with intellectual interest, but at the end there was (for me) no emotional resonance. So what does one do with that? The very lyrical ending was wonderful. Fraia is a writer of talent and the translation by Zoe Perry seems excellent, Worth re-reading, esp. in light of LeClezio’s Nobel address The forest of Paradoxes. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2008/clezio/25790-jean-marie-gustave-le-clezio-nobel-lecture-2008/
It seems to be about loneliness and the impossibility of connection within the urban atmosphere. Neither Nadia and Klaus or the painter and his subject or the couple in her story (until the end maybe) can connect and are lonely and yet…the city moves on, so does time, war history. This really impressed me with its flow and meta levels and intertwining of stories and yes, it’s not 100% satisfying, but the couple lost in the city, a story within the story, with which it ends is haunting. I’d really love to hear some of this site’s regulars chime in here. Where are you all?
Ken –
I found a lot to like in this story. Yes, there are meta levels and two parallel intertwined stories running along in similar ways. From the title we get a clue to the theme – Sevastopol is both a real place and a place of the imagination, where neither of the two principal characters has ever been. Likewise, Nadia first sets her story in Moscow, where she also has not been. Gradually she brings it closer to home, and it becomes very non-mysterious, as opposed to its original tone, and completely down to earth. In fact, it becomes not so much an invented story, but an expression of her yearning. And at that point it becomes a non-story, in the traditional sense.
Klaus, too, never realizes his goal — having the beautiful blonde boy play the central role. And his play flops. In a similar fashion, the imaginary painter Bogan Trunov can never paints actual war. Even when a soldier asks him to do so, he uses actors and props. And when the young man dies, Trunov leaves the painting unfinished. I think that is what this story depicts – the impossibility of ever melding imagination and “reality”. In fact, Klaus puts his hand on the map and says “This is the World.” What’s real to him is what happens in his mind.
There are many statements about what a story is, which I think are intended seriously, not as red herrings. Klaus says that all stories are weird stories where nothing happens. Soon after, Nadia says that her life was weird – with the implication that nothing happens. As in the final version of her Nadia-Sasha story.
At the end the fictional Nadia become the central character and melds with the narrator Nadia. She can’t cross the street – i.e., she can’t reach her goal. What is it she is trying to reach? She tells us earlier: she tries to write the story so that “Sasha and Nadia could be friends, could stroll through a strange city together. But I couldn’t write it that way.” As you said, Ken, people can’t get together in a deep way.
And reality and imagination can never meet. Trunov “was always breathing the leaden air of war – he’s up to his neck in it – but war, the war itself, never appeared in his paintings.” Similarly with stories, both Klaus’s and Nadia’s, reality can’t enter. In Nadia’s story, “a leaden air descends on them – silence.” Incompletion, non-communication.
Which shows up again in Nadia’s revision of the play:
“What I had in mind was that Trunov wouldn’t be able to paint the picture.”
Mkevane —
I should also have mentioned that I too felt that this story was in the mind and not emotional. Yet I liked it and think it was well written.