Propped up by Structures That Could Collapse at Any Moment: A Conversation with Emilio Fraia

Emilio Fraia photographed by Bob Wolfenson

Rosie Ellison-Balaam talks to Emilio Fraia about his triptych of stories Sevastopol, its elegant yet multilayered composition, and how it probes the slippery relationship between experience and our attempts at representing experience – in fiction as in the stories we tell ourselves and each other, today and over time. As Heraclitus put it, one can never step into the same river twice, and Giacometti could never recreate the same head. To Fraia, art and fiction is our best chance not at pinning down reality, but at pointing to the ever-changing, pervious fabric of experience. Translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry.

Sevastopol is divided into three distinct stories, each with their own characters and plot, but there are similarities. Why did the novel take this form? What did you want the reader to get from them collectively?

I wanted to write stories that stood on their own, but, at the same time, when set side by side, could be connected by subtle links, by a shared pacing. As if beyond the voice narrating each of the stories there was something subjective, blurry, hovering over everything, creating an effect, a feeling of strangeness. A feeling of difference (after all, the stories are independent), but also of proximity (recurring themes, a common tone, a sense of progression). So, while the book isn’t a traditional novel as such, that’s often how I’d like it to be read, or thought about in that way. I wanted the reader to reach the end and be able to go back through the stories, looking for those echoes, intersections, points of contact.

What led you to using Leo Tolstoy’s The Sevastopol Sketches (1855) as the underlying foundation of your book – what drew you to this work, and how did it inform your aesthetic, narratological, and temporal choices?

I really like this line from The Sevastopol Sketches: “all along, the fighting had worn on in a kind of shadow and unconsciousness, to such a degree that everything that happened seemed to them to have happened elsewhere, at another time, and with other people”. This hallucinatory aspect, this movement of experiences, I think relates to Sevastopol as well. The stories are told clearly, but the characters inhabit this shadowy, unconscious space that Tolstoy talks about. When the reader follows along with the lives of people like Nilo, Klaus, Nadia, and Lena, I’d like there to be a bit of that feeling; of seeing what we cannot see. Another interesting thing are the photographs by Roger Fenton. Fenton went to Sevastopol in 1855 to document the war. He produced 360 photos over four months. I remember seeing a picture of the soldiers’ barracks in Crimea and thinking it looked like the base camps on Everest, which surely tells us something about the world of adventure sports. But I think mostly about the famous photographs he took of a road both with and without cannonballs, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Fenton took two photos, one of a road filled with cannonballs and another of the same road, from the same angle, without the cannonballs. Apparently, he moved the cannonballs from the ditch to the middle of the road in order to achieve a more eloquent image. But both photos survived and made their way to us. Which one is truer? Which one, ultimately, was taken first? Can one be more real than the other? What can fiction tell us? This idea of enacting or staging, the question of truth and falsehood, the relationship between experience and the representation of experience. All this relates to Fenton’s photos — and to Sevastopol as well.

In your interview with Deborah Treisman for The New Yorker, you said of Sevastopol that it is “all slightly unreal and, therefore, more real”. Could you say more about this state of uncanny that appears throughout the novel?

I didn’t want to write a metafictional or, let's say, postmodern book because books like that can wind up being kind of boring or too cold. I wanted to tell stories about people, human dramas. But at the same time, it’s 2021, we don’t read the same way we used to read literature in the past. So, I wanted the book to also be a commentary on the status of fiction, on the limits of narrative. But how do I do this and maintain the tension of the story, not allowing the reader’s interest in the stories to wane? I think a lot of the strangeness of Sevastopol comes from that; the narrative is also an enigma that must be deciphered in order to access the meaning of the book. The places where the stories take place, for example. The Crimean city of Sevastopol, Everest, Lima, São Paulo. I tried to work from representations of these places, or rather from the idea of how those representations can contain what’s real, in itself – how they can, like fiction, speak more to what’s real than reality itself. The kind of thing you find in Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-Soo’s films or Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri’s pictures. In the book, Sevastopol first appears as a picture on a postcard, then as a city on a map. The Himalayas look like they’re made of cardboard, appearing in the midst of a commercial shoot. Lima in the 1980s is practically a hallucination. Klaus is a kind of vampire pulled from a B-horror film version of São Paulo. All of this creates an unusual air, something unreal. I like that.

At the centre of each story is a pair of characters, each with an air of mystery around them. Often something seems to be missing or left out, which you cannot always put your finger on. What role do you think these gaps play?

The writers I most admire work with ellipses, silence, the space between sentences. Natalia Ginzburg, Yasunari Kawabata, Chekhov, Hemingway, Robert Walser, Mario Bellatin. They all seem a bit like poets too. They work like poets. A lot of things get left outside. There’s a beautiful text in which Roland Barthes compares Flaubert and Balzac. It’s wonderful, and talks about how Flaubert practically invents the ellipsis in realist narrative – which makes him a very modern writer we’d be having coffee with here today. “Flaubert practices the ellipsis. He does not appose. For him, the sentence is like an object, a microsystem having its internal hierarchy (as opposed to Balzac, who accumulates multiple incidents). What Balzac would have catalysed, Flaubert evacuates; Flaubert’s one simple phrase (‘As it was thirty-three degrees hot, Bourdon Boulevard was completely deserted’) would have provided a whole first paragraph for Balzac – climatic considerations regarding Paris, sociology of the Paris summer, topography of the Bastille, etc. It’s useful to note the relationship to science, to scientific discourse. Balzac is closer to science than Flaubert is. The ellipsis is not scientific, to be elliptical is not a good thing. The ellipsis assumes that one has chosen another value system – art. Or again, silence. Without ever being hermetic, the Flaubertian sentence lets silences be heard. Silence is the constitutive place of the sentence, as of music.”

Indeed in the gaps between the stories, and even in the space between sentences, to borrow your phrase, Sevastopol seems to be brimming with other latent stories; those that seem to be withheld from us as readers, located just a little too far outside our field of vision for us to see them clearly, but equally those which are activated when characters tell each other stories. The recounted stories intertwine and sometimes overtake the characters’ narrative. Why did you want the reader to be diverted by these anecdotes, histories, memories?

I guess that’s a bit the way things work in life, isn’t it? Listening to stories and absorbing them in our own way. There’s a larger plot formed by these stories. But one day, some of those stories suddenly don’t make so much sense anymore. As if our consciousness, what we call our individuality, were propped up by structures that could collapse at any moment.

Do you think different modes of retelling stories affects their reception? What made the delivery of Lena’s accident in ‘December’ take the form of an email, versus the oral, almost rumour-like story of the pig in ‘May’?

In the book, there’s always someone who’s telling, remembering. And the story that’s being told takes the lead and winds up operating as a kind of commentary on the main story, and the book as well. These are simple stories that start to become complex. In ‘May’ it’s Nilo, the old owner of the inn, who receives the story, who says nothing, just listens. And this attentive listening is the key to the story. In the end, what does Adán’s story set in motion in Nilo’s soul? In ‘December’, Lena watches a video in an art gallery and writes a long email to the artist who made the video. This email, this letter, is the story itself. Lena is sure that what she saw in the video was her story, she’s sure that the artist ‘stole’ her story. And gradually we understand that the only person who could know all that about her is Gino, the documentary filmmaker with whom Lena had an affair, the guy who accompanied her on several climbs around the world. So, the letter we’re reading is a letter to Gino. A letter of love, madness, sadness, hatred. The moment Lena changes the letter’s recipient, when she no longer addresses the artist but Gino, is the climax of the whole thing. It’s like she reached the top of the mountain. And everything changes from there, the story takes on another meaning in retrospect. Because the tone of a story depends on that; to whom the narrative voice is speaking.

Could you tell me about the role of images in the novel? From Gino’s videos in ‘December’, Nilo’s aversion to photographs in ‘May’, to the postcard Nadia receives in ‘August’, art is encountered by all the characters. At the same time, the book takes the shape of a triptych. What do you think is offered to you in the meeting between writing and art?

My favourite scene in the book is when Klaus, half drunk, starts telling Nadia a story about the first bust Giacometti sculpted at the age of thirteen, and how, fifty years later, in his studio, the sculptor tries to recreate that head, the same head, same size, and can’t do it anymore. And there’s the story that Nadia is writing, that she keeps redoing, three versions of the same story. I think my ideas about art and writing, representation and reality, can be summed up in these episodes.

I would love to hear what you are up to at the moment?

At the moment, just dreaming about the vaccine and Bolsonaro behind bars.

Sevastopol, tr. Zoë Perry, was published on 1 June 2021.