Bruna Dantas Lobato has won some major awards for her excellent translation work. Blue Light Hours is her first novel, and I’ve been looking forward to it since I find her translations so intriguing. In many ways I was surprised at how different Blue Light Hours is from what I might have anticipated. On the surface, it is straightforward and rather comforting. In its presumably semi-autobiographical pages, we meet a young Brazilian woman beginning her first term at a university in the northeastern United States in the early 2010s.

During my first couple of weeks on campus, I kept a record of my new experiences in a notebook. Foods I ate for the first time, things I’d never seen before, phrases I didn’t know, words I couldn’t yet pronounce. Hegemony, facetious, Worcestershire. A red barn converted into an academic building, large cups of coffee with straws, blue eggs in a bird’s nest, a deer tick, I was told, crawling up my leg. I carried the notebook in my pocket and scribbled on it unabashedly during class, meals, conversations with friends, in the hopes it would help me capture something about this place. I’d have a fuller picture than what I could show someone through a camera, which would help me remember it later, and would also help me share it with my mother.

Her mother of course has stayed behind in Brazil, alone since the narrator has no siblings and her father is not in the picture. But the two of them are able to keep in touch through the magic of Skype. As things go, at first they see each other frequently, then less frequently, then they have moments where they log in and keep the video chat going even while they doze off. The book is a lovely exploration of the ways two people might try to keep a foothold in each other’s lives despite the great physical distance.

It’s also a book about experiencing the joys and anxieties of a new culture, all while starting a completely new, invigorating phase of life: “I’d never be able to finish telling my mother what I saw. I would need as much time for telling as I would need for living,” the narrator says.

All of this was done well and was enjoyable. Had the book been just a chronological account of this first year apart, I still would have liked it and found it insightful. After all, that’s what I thought I was reading for the first hundred pages or so. But Blue Light Hours expanded a great deal for me in its latter parts when it goes back to Brazil to explore the mother’s somewhat empty life as she tries to cope and figure out who she is now that her daughter is on the other side of the world.

The mother had already been alone for a year when she suddenly started to change how she lived in her little apartment. The armchair in the corner had gone untouched for weeks at a time. She felt it was too on the nose to sit there, on a chair made only for one person. She’d long gotten into the habit of sitting in the middle of the couch instead, ignoring the line that split it into two discrete seats, or lying down with her head on one armrest and her feet up on the other, her body taking up its entire length. The couch felt purposeful to her, like she could choose to put her lonely self in a place for two. So she finally decided to get rid of the armchair. A cousin came and hauled it away, exposed the dust bunnies behind it. She swept the floor and stood in the empty spot. The living room felt even bigger, the mother even smaller.

And then the book expand even further when we read a section about their short but powerful reunion. I was deeply touched by the humanity explored.