On a sweltering day in early spring, Oséias appears on his sister’s doorstep like a ghost. No one is expecting him, not since he left town twenty years before. No one has heard from him, either, communication with his family having petered out in the meantime. With no explanation for his return, Oséias begins haunting his early life. As he walks the streets of his childhood, he retreats into a past that he keeps trying to connect — somehow, anyhow — with his present moment.

But connection is exactly what keeps failing in Luiz Ruffato’s Late Summer (translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches). No matter how many people Oséias encounters, no matter how many old friends pour out their life stories while he appears to listen, he remains shuttered and closed, preoccupied with the discomforts of his body — frequent, painful trips to the bathroom, a nauseous stomach, a lingering headache — as he roams across the five days of the novel’s timeline. Even as he leads us through the town of Cataguases, Oséias remains a mystery to the reader. Aside from the barest details of his adult life in São Paolo, we learn almost nothing about him.

What becomes increasingly clear is that apart from his bodily preoccupations, Oséias is focused on the inner landscape of his memories, particularly of childhood — the streets where he rode his bike, the schoolyard and classrooms, the friends’ homes. His present actions, words, and gestures are flat compared to the vividness of what he remembers as he walks from house to boteca to café to downtown. As the days pass, he becomes even more ghostlike, so inwardly turned that his thoughts begin to overwhelm his present reality, and the prose mimics the thinning of the veil between what Oséias thinks and what he does. As sentences unravel into lists of images and feelings, scenes fragment into juxtapositions of thought and gesture. At the very level of the text, skilfully rendered by Sanches in English, Oséias keeps vanishing.

i need to close the window the window’s still open

hat where have i left my hat marilda strips lies on tops of me marcim fertilizer i need to close the

the window mom tell him to stop nicolau is going to be when he grows up he answered my god what a clever boy the sun is poison look right there in the corner go take care of your

He sets out to visit his siblings, one after the other, and although each offers him both shelter and comfort, the reader quickly understands that Oséias is looking for the one sibling he won’t be able to find: Lydia, who died when she was fifteen. There is more going on here than the musings of a homesick man: What happened to Lydia, and why is Oséias still so hounded by events that the other characters seem to have buried? The haunting is twinned at this point, as both phantoms become important to the novel’s unfolding.

Late Summer revels in a kind of psychological claustrophobia, although I don’t mean that in a critically negative way. The story is told, intensely, in the first person; Oséias is completely trapped inside his mind and so, therefore, is the reader. Luckily, Ruffato has given Oséais a mix of honesty and fragility that draws the reader in and generates a reciprocal introspection. Why is this man so alienated from his family and friends? What does it mean to look intently at one’s past? What might cause a person to stop looking forward, to be only willing or able to look backward? More than anything, Oséias seems bewildered at finding himself where he is. To deal with that bewilderment, he appears to take solace in the repetition of several gestures:

I pull on a pair of clean underwear and pants. Tear off a square of toilet paper and clear the mist from my glasses. My face looms in the mirror. I avert my eyes. I floss and brush my teeth. Spray my chest and underarms with deodorant. I collect the shampoo and conditioner, dry them with a towel.

Each morning and evening, he repeats these same steps with a touching fastidiousness: folding his clothes, cleaning his glasses, washing his hands and face, or his body. He may not be able to articulate his anxiety or distress, but his gestures are an immediate giveaway. And as he journeys from sibling to sibling, he intensifies these ritual-like gestures until it becomes clear that Oséias is preparing himself, ceremonially, for a final encounter with his long-lost Lydia.

At its heart, Late Summer is a novel about how easily relationships fray and how readily isolation grows. Although it isn’t depressing or overly grim, its glints of light remain subtle. Oséias and his short journey are a timely reminder to reconsider the connections — delicate, strong, or even unseen — that branch throughout our own lives.

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Born in 1961, in Cataguases, Brazil, Luiz Ruffato grew up in a poor migrant family. He has worked as a textile worker and a turner-mechanical, and he studied journalism. In 2001, his debut novel, There Were Many Horses, won the Brazilian National Library’s Machado de Assis Award and the APCA Award for best novel; the novel, which has been translated into German, Spanish, French, and Italian, is widely considered to be among the best books recently published in Brazil.

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