If the title of this book by Maria Judite de Carvalho calls for an answer, it has to be, ‘As a woman, I’ve been frustrated, puzzled by the way life passes me by, with no-one, especially my husband, able to understand or love me’. Time and again in these short stories (some 450 pages of them!) selected from the author’s later works, the female protagonists find life a puzzle that disappoints them in ways that are not so much cataclysmic as simply impenetrable.
Carvalho was one of the most prominent female authors in Portugal during the middle and late twentieth century. Born in 1922, and living almost all her life in Lisbon apart from five years in France and Belgium, she died in 1998 after writing several novels and nine collections of short stories, gaining a loyal readership and official recognition in her native country as an essential literary voice. Her work had not appeared in English until a few years ago, when Two Lines Press boldly embarked on the publication of several of her books, all of them translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
The forty or more short stories in this collection focus almost entirely on the existential dilemmas of middle-class Portuguese women. They have husbands who go out and ‘do important things’ (often involving betrayal of the woman left behind) whereas their wives sit at home, re-acting rather than acting. One of the stories is entitled The Flying Man and the Woman Who Had No Wings, and this could well serve as the emblem for many of the other short, incisive stories.
‘For twenty years, Karl had played happily at life, one day here, another day there. He wasn’t a great trapezist, one of those who wins international acclaim and whose name appears in big, bright letters in the history of the circus. [. . .] Ever since the day when Amélia — a quiet, respectable bourgeois woman from a small provincial town, an exemplary wife and mother — had abandoned everything, home and family, to follow the trapezist on his uncertain path, he had never looked at another woman, or only professionally, the way doctors look at the patients who visit them, even the most beautiful of them. Amélia had only seen Karl at work once, and, on that occasion, she simultaneously fell passionately in love with him and felt a terrible fear of losing what she did not yet have. Then she actually met him, and left everything in order to follow him.’
Carvalho portrayal of this forced limitation on the possibility of meaningful action through the female characters’ constant doubts about what they can achieve. Stylistically, this is conveyed in her frequent use of sentences that set out to make a definite statement, only to be instantly qualified. The protagonist of The Aquarium for example muses when she repeatedly finds herself called upon to tell her husband as he leaves for work: ‘Yes, she was happy — on certain exceptional days, she even found herself having to say that she was very happy — to smile (she had to smile), and then spend all day picking her way through the long long day, carefully avoiding any traps, and smiling again when he came home and again asked her if she was happy.’
In many ways, Carvalho’s fictional world is reminiscent of an almost exact contemporary of hers, the English writer Elizabeth Taylor, who wrote perfectly calibrated novels that portrayed women checked both intellectually and emotionally by their daily routines and constantly looking for ways to escape. Like her English counterpart, Carvalho is expert at creating tension and interest out of what at first glance might seem not to amount to very much. What is most important is the inner emotional turmoil; as a result, there is little in Carvalho’s stories that can be construed as political — there is no condemnation of the Salazar dictatorship or the struggle against it, little description of urban life in Portugal during the second half of the twentieth century, no portrayal of the natural world surrounding the main characters. Instead, the focus is almost entirely on the characters’ inner debates. They include several stories where children and adolescents are in the spotlight, hesitating on the threshold of what seems to them to be a confusing, morally ambivalent adult world.
And How Have You Been is Impeccably translated by Margaret Jull Costa who achieves, apparently effortlessly, the magical ventriloquism of providing Carvalho with a completely convincing voice in English. Jull Costa has single-handedly — thanks to Two Lines Press — brought the intriguing work of one of Portugal’s mid-twentieth century important authors to an English-language audience. By its very nature (and length) And How Have You Been is a book to be dipped into and enjoyed piecemeal for its variations on a theme. For a more sustained narrative, English-speaking readers are likely to enjoy the novel Empty Wardrobes, also translated by Jull Costa.
Reviewed by Nick Caistor for BookBlast®
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