Memory Haunts a Lonely Hunter: Luiz Ruffato’s Late Summer

Late Summer is a quiet novel about loneliness, the universal human desire to be seen and felt, and the slow cost of isolation.

Late SummerNear the end of Luiz Ruffato’s Late Summer, as his six-day journey to his hometown of Cataguases in southeastern Brazil reaches its end, Oséias remembers wandering into the forest around Rodeiro as a child. After falling asleep in the quiet paradise of the forest, pretending to be dead, he awoke and ran back home, certain that his family was searching for him. “For a brief moment, I savored the sensation that I mattered, that I was somebody, and that my absence had been felt,” he remembers as he climbs back into the same forest. Though it’s clear throughout Late Summer where the story is going, to borrow a quote attributed to Miles Davis, like so much about Oséias’s sojourn back to Cataguases, it’s not the notes that Ruffato plays that matter, but the notes he doesn’t.

Oséias has, when he arrives in Cataguases, lost all of the ordinary measurements of a successful life: His wife and son have abandoned him, his financial resources are running out, and his health is declining. His feelings of inadequacy have naturally driven him back to that enclave where we go to seek some reassurance: the family, the home, the place where it all began. But in the 20 years that have passed since his last visit, the only attachments that he’s maintained have been by way of infrequent calls with his younger sister, Isinha. As for the town itself, Ruffato does a skillful job of characterizing it in a way that makes it seem more than just some provincial setting for his narrative to play out (it’s his own hometown, after all).

Though it becomes clear as the novel progresses that Oséias has returned home to end his life, it’s also evident that he needs something else from his home and what’s left of his family before he can go through with it. Oséias wanders from family to old acquaintances and lovers (even contemplating seeking some relief from a priest) trying to organize his life into some pattern that would allow him to derive meaning from it all. The novel is written in the present tense, but as Oséias’s mind wanders as freely as the rest of him, the past and present intermingle in a natural stream of consciousness that makes his mission seem more pressing and authentic. He needs some evidence that “there had once been a place called Cataguases, where a man by the name of Oséias used to live.” As he attempts feebly to reconnect with siblings and old friends, his return to Cataguases is defined as much by the absences from this town (his late sister Lígia, his parents) as the presence of his remaining siblings.

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Everyone from Oséias’s life has seemingly been driven off in opposing directions: his siblings barely speak to one another, torn apart by imagined jealousies and real class differences; old friends and ex-lovers now either barely recognize him or are themselves unrecognizable to him. Oséias’s perpetual wandering prevents everyone from fully breaking through his isolation. In contrast, Ruffato gives us such a complete window into Oséias’s solitude that hardly a single moment is lost over the six days he spends wandering the town—from dawn to dusk, meals to bowel movements to streams of thought as he nods off to sleep each night.

Stripped of paragraph breaks or typical divisions between speakers, interrupted with idle thoughts that distract Oséias from his immediate train of thought, Late Summer’s continuous prose embeds the reader so intimately within Oséias’s story that it becomes even easier to identify with the man as he feels carried along toward the inevitable. The insecurity and the distance separating him from the world are felt more deeply as a result. Amid it all, the only thing that Oséias ever has trouble speaking about or remembering is Lígia’s suicide. And it’s from within this closeted memory that we begin to understand that part of the goal of his return home is his hope of recovering some answer or detail from it.

When he first brings up Lígia’s memory to his sister Rosana, admitting that he thinks of her every day, she erupts in frustration: “Are you still obsessing over that?!” She dismisses his attempt to memorialize Lígia, calling her suicide a “reckless act” that destroyed their family. With Isinha, he only has slightly more success before she admits that it’s been a while since she’s thought of Lígia. By the time he reaches his brother, João Lucio, it seems pointless to try again. The family has chosen to forget Lígia, or at least to barely speak of her. With Oséias now on the cusp of a similar act, it’s clear why this sits at the heart of his return to Cataguases. With a son and ex-wife who no longer speaking to him, and a family driven apart by class and loss, there’s a sense that no one and nothing will carry an impression of his life once he’s gone.

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At the beginning of the novel, Oséias reflects on when he first moved to São Paolo: “I used to like wandering the coach terminal on weekends…I did this to quell the loneliness that drove me out of my room…Or maybe I did it to confirm that I—who often felt invisible as I wandered anonymously through the crowd—was real.” With Late Summer, Ruffato gives us a quiet novel about loneliness, the universal human desire to be seen and felt, and the slow cost of isolation.

Late Summer is available on July 6 from Other Press.

Matthew Snider

Matthew Snider reviews books for PopMatters, and writes on culture, literature, and politics from Maryland.

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