CLAIRE'S PICK

So Many People, Mariana is a collection that takes seriously the reality, however inconvenient, of other people. In these stories, Carvalho attends to the condition of the soul, of social lives and feral deviations, and studies “the silence of [these] noises.” This phrase comes from the eponymous story and suggests, to my mind, Carvalho’s method: to listen to mechanisms, like work and marriage, that capitalism and patriarchy seek to mute, and amplify them. Carvalho stresses the muscles of money by writing holes into socks and sad hats onto women’s heads, and Jull Costa’s sleek translation reads as coolly inevitable as circumstance. These sentences lay a bloodless hand to a world flush with itself. -CF

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Long discounted by a literary culture that actively rejected women’s writing, Maria Judite de Carvalho’s biting and bitterly funny work has since exploded across the world. 

Collecting the entirety of her short works written between 1959 and 1967, when the Salazar dictatorship and the rigid edicts of the Catholic church reigned, the stories in So Many People, Mariana might as well have been written today. These are tough, unflinching accounts of women trapped by a culture that values them as workers or wives but not as people. And if they do escape their circumstances, they are, more often than not, irrevocably punished by the world. 

Paperback | 450 pages | 5.00" x 8.00"