Reader Alert! The following includes spoilers. Do not read on if you are the sort of person who is upset by learning how a book ends before you’re read it.
Ruffato was born in Cataguases, a small industrial city in southeastern Brazil. The novel is set there and, if the text is to be believed (and why not?), the town has fallen on evil days. The textile factories on which the economy was based have closed. The polluted and stinking river Pomba floods during the rainy season. Street crime is common.
The grandson of immigrants who fled northern Italy, Ruffato worked throughout his youth as a bar clerk, textile worker, street book vendor, and turner to supplement the income of his parents, a popcorn vendor and a laundress. He earned a journalism degree from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, and later settled in São Paulo.
He is the author of eight novels as well as short story collections, poetry, and essays. In addition to numerous Brazilian literary prizes, his works have received the Premio Casa de las Américas (Cuba) and the Hermann Hesse Literaturpreis (Germany), and have been published in thirteen countries. Since 2003 Ruffato has worked exclusively as a writer.
Late Summer begins with Oseias Moretto Nunes, an older (elderly?) Cataguases native returning to his home town from Sao Paolo on Tuesday, March 3, which could make it 2015. His wife has left him taking their son. He is sick, and he is tired. He still has two sisters living in the city; a third sister, Légia, is dead. And he has a successful and wealthy brother. His parents are dead. He did not return to the city for their funerals.
Oseias spends five days in the city, two nights his sister Rosana’s houses. Rosana is a school principal, visits New York City once a year, is fighting a furious if losing battle with the signs of aging, and is married to a doctor Ricardo. After the second night, Rosana leaves a note in her “teacherly scrawl”:
“Oseias, I’m afraid this situation can’t go on. Ricardo has been patient, too patient. I don’t want to get into a fight with him at this point in my life. He’d appreciate it, we’d appreciate it, if you could find some other place to stay. Rosana.” He moves to a cheap hotel.
A former school chum is now mayor and Oseias attempts to see him, finally ambushing him one morning. The mayor is not interested in talking about old times and brushes him off. Oseias does connect accidentally with a former art teacher who is now sick and penniless and who would like to talk about old times. Oseias is repulsed and escapes.
He visits his younger sister Isinha (Isabela), who is married to an affable drunk and has an ingrate and shiftless adult son who has at least two illegitimate children. Isinha, although poor and estranged from her Cataguases siblings, seems to have accepted her portion. She washes and irons his dirty laundry Oseias brings her. But in a house overflowing with children, Isinha has no place—or much time—for her brother.
João Lúcio, Oseias’s younger brother, having been given a leg up by an uncle, has been able to turn a local sawmill into a regional furniture manufacturer and himself into a rich man with a big house, a pool, a wife and a mistress. Caught unawares by his older brother’s arrival, he invites Oseias to spend the night in the guest room although he cannot stay with him. He has an unspecified appointment elsewhere.
In the final pages, Oseias showers in João Lúcio’s house, dresses in his clean, freshly ironed clothes, destroys his driver’s license and ID, crushes the pills he’s been collecting for his condition (cancer?) to make a cocktail. On Sunday, March 8, he hides himself in the deep woods behind the estate and kills himself.
Late Summer is so vivid, so alive that it did not occur to me until much later to wonder how Oseias was able to tell his story in the first person—the only way it could be told and have the effect it has—if he were dead.
I can imagine some readers will be put off by the 277 pages of solid type, no paragraphs. The book’s design reflects Oseias’s thoughts and perceptions, leavened with dialogue, as they pour from him.
I can also imagine readers being put off by all the unfamiliar names of relatives, children, friends, associates, acquaintances. Julia Sanches’s translation from Portuguese is fluent and smooth however, so anything the reader bumps on is the author’s not hers. (For example, I had to look up “Cebion” to learn it’s a branded form of vitamin C.)
But you don’t read Late Summer to ask how a dead narrator can tell his story or for the plot. You read it—or I read it once I became acclimated to the lack of paragraphing—for a powerful evocation of a man trying to make sense of his life. To explain to himself how he came to be where he is. To attempt one last time to only connect with his sisters, his brother, his nieces and nephews, his childhood companions.
You read Late Summer for a compelling portrait of contemporary Brazilian life. Ruffato’s evocation of Cataguases is not one that will please the local tourist office. (And I cannot imagine what the Covid-19 pandemic is doing to the town.)
You read Late Summer because it extends your knowledge of what it is to be human.
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