Grace Period - by Maria Judite de Carvalho (Paperback)

About the Book

"In searing prose, keenly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, the Portuguese master Maria Judite de Carvalho's narrator is at a crossroads, but too paralyzed to change direction from the life that he no longer seems to control"--

Book Synopsis

Mateo Silva is at a crossroads, but too paralyzed to change direction in a life that he no longer seems to control.

After 25 years away, he has returned to sell his childhood home so he can send his longtime girlfriend--whom he now realizes he may have never loved--on a trip to the Acropolis before her cancer kills her. Mateo sells the home to the first bidder: his wealthy neighbor from childhood, whose wife, Graça, enchanted Mateo as a young man. It was Graça's beauty, paired with his father's unfaithfulness, that broke up his family. But the woman he sees now bears little resemblance to the one he remembers, and you can't move forward by revisiting the past.

Review Quotes

"A taut, uneasy book, haunted by green-haired women and childhood-glimpsed beauty, and filled with bittersweet melancholy. The sale of a home shouldn't be as tension-filled and catalyzing as it is in this brilliant blade-point of a novel by Maria Judite de Carvalho"--Madeline Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest

Praise for Maria Judite de Carvalho

"Executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy...There is no doubting the authenticity of Carvalho's vision and the originality and severity of her voice, as scathing and pitiless in her depiction of 'empty' women as in her depiction of oafish swaggering machismo." --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

"Melancholic, contemplative, and often heartbreaking."--Foreword Reviews

"These stories are bold and unsparing, quietly devastating. A fearless exploration of longing and the claustrophobia of loneliness."--Kayla Maiuri, author of Mother in the Dark

"Empty Wardrobes will give you a sense of domestic life under the dictatorship: In precise, unsentimental prose, it tells the story of three generations of women overshadowed by the death of a patriarch." --Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, New York Times

"A book about how men betray women, and how women betray each other...a work that does not hesitate to expose the cruelties and power grabs that lie beneath marriage, and how quickly society discards aging women." --Rhian Sasseen, Paris Review

"The specter of the patriarchy looms over this mid-20th century tale like depression itself. With the astringent wit of Natalia Ginzburg, Empty Wardrobes is a spellbinding book of domestic disorder that sparks with bitterness and humor." --Lauren LeBlanc, Observer

"Margaret Jull Costa's translation hits not a single false note. The text has an antique finish without being dated...The novella manages to cast the eye of a worried oracle on an entire nation." --Asymptote

"Translated from Portuguese by the award-winning and prolific translator Margaret Jull Costa, the novel is rendered in clear, finely-wrought prose. Not a single word feels wasted or misplaced. ...one of those rare, transcendent works." --The Rupture

"Superb." --The Modern Novel