“The banal of today will be in journals some day,” the Brazilian musician Chico Buarque once wrote. I don’t know if Buarque was thinking of his contemporary, Caio Fernando Abreu, when he wrote that lyric. But Moldy Strawberries, Abreu’s newly translated story collection, takes daily constraints and desires, neuroses and visions, and turns them into a powerful literary achievement. The book is a sensation in the most fundamental sense — a burning stimulus to the body and the mind.

While well-known and praised in Brazil, Abreu’s work is little known in the United States. Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato, Moldy Strawberries introduces Abreu’s writing to Anglophone readers. Abreu wrote during the 1970s and ‘80s, when Brazil was under a series of repressive military dictatorships. Because Abreu’s journalism and fiction often focused on queer characters — he was himself bisexual — his work not surprisingly brought him to the attention of the Brazilian police and secret service. He lived outside of Brazil, in Europe, for some years, and died of AIDS in 1994. He was forty-eight.

Like a Sally Rooney novel or an episode of Seinfeld, much of Moldy Strawberries is just friends having conversations. The characters in the book — horny bohemians, lonely office workers, perplexed students, innocent activists, people with time on their hands and too much on their minds — do very little to subvert anything, except perhaps themselves. They smoke by a window, eat leftover chicken, walk down boulevards in the rain, and exasperate each other. In the story “Fat Tuesday,” two men meet on the dance floor at Carnival and one tells the other that “figs aren’t fruit, that they’re actually flowers that bloom inward.” Abreu’s people are those figs, constantly “moving between mirrors” as they seek to understand themselves.

Abreu crafts intellectual characters with wry swiftness. They are fully formed and frustrated when we encounter them, but Abreu peels away their superfluities to reveal their inner consciousness of themselves and each other. Suffused with desire, Moldy Strawberries offers dialogue, narratives, troubles, and achievements in service of seeing how connections are formed. The dancing man of “Fat Tuesday” was thinking about figs because he was about to kiss the other man’s lips which “were like a ripe fig cut into quarters, the pulp slowly torn from the round side to the tip with the blade of a knife, revealing the pink insides full of seeds.” Who wouldn’t make out with a man who could form metaphors like that?

The writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins once wrote that a shared look of desire was “like a wire going back and forth” between people. Abreu takes that wire and pings it with his finger to feel how it shakes. For him, those wires are so boundless as to be almost astral. Two friends talk with each other:

‘Natural is people losing and meeting each other.’

‘Parallel lines meet at infinity.’

‘Infinity is endless. Infinity is never.’

‘Or forever.’

Lines chase each other across space; Abreu makes relationships seem intimate and capacious at once. His cultural relationships reach across spectra, as well. If I have one critique of the book, it’s that an introduction would have been useful for placing Abreu within his political and cultural context. His many influences and references, which range from Audrey Hepburn to Leibniz, signal a voracious mind while making a statement against the narrowly nationalistic repression of his time. The book has two dedications, one for his living friends (including the composer Caetano Veloso) and one for his dead ones (including John Lennon). Music plays a central role in the book. Some stories even begin with recommendations for accompaniments by musicians like the Brazilian singer Angela Ro Ro and the French composer Erik Satie.

Indeed, the eighteen stories are perhaps best understood as melodic variations on a theme. The simple constraint of Abreu’s writing allows for formal experimentation. Some of the pieces are just dialogue, while others consist of a single paragraph stretching over three or four pages. I hesitate to call the writing spare; the connotation seems to be that much lies behind the surface. But Abreu is blatant in the best way. I was often reminded of his Brazilian compatriot, Clarice Lispector, whose books seemed to wrench you straight into her nerve endings. But if Lispector’s writing draws its power from its claustrophobic transcendence, Abreu’s prose offers a meter to the trembling gravity that pulls us towards one another.

Such writing is “made of expectations rather than of cruel certainties,” to borrow a line from the story “Photographs.” Those ongoing expectations of each other — platonic, erotic, political, psychological — are sometimes fulfilled and sometimes not. But they always form the “moral intercourse” that matters to Abreu. Moldy Strawberries is a startling, sensuous, and pulpy journal of the meaning we make of each other.

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