In her debut novella, Blue Light Hours, award-winning translator Bruna Dantas Lobato explores how distance—between languages, cultures and places—can affect a relationship.
At the center of the story are a mother and daughter and the rituals they create to remain close to each other despite the thousands of miles between them. The unnamed daughter is in her first year at a small liberal arts college in Vermont; her mother remains at home in Brazil. The daughter goes about her mundane days and then recounts them to her mother over Skype. Her mother, in return, offers details about her own increasingly lonely life.
These exchanges between mother and daughter are both melancholic and mesmerizing. Neither of their lives are particularly interesting in the conventional sense. There are no devastating breakups or major meltdowns, no financial catastrophes or familial betrayals. The daughter does her schoolwork, makes friends with her fellow international students, eats in the dining hall, observes the unfamiliar New England seasons. The mother watches soap operas, goes to work, asks again and again about her daughter’s strange new world.
The book, instead, probes beneath the surface: How much of a life can truly be shared over Skype? How does being apart change a relationship as foundational and important as the one between a mother and a daughter? What happens when what is shared, over time, becomes rote, empty?
Dantas Lobato explores these questions with thoughtful nuance. Her writing sometimes feels emotionally restrained, but perhaps this is a reflection of the characters’ longing: the daughter’s longing for the particular ways her mother knows her and also for the excitement of a new, separate life; the mother’s longing for her daughter to remain close. The prose itself embodies loneliness: crisp, declarative sentences that have the flow and rhythm of poetry. Blue Light Hours is an intimate meditation on home and homesickness, belonging and wanting to belong, on what it means to leave and be left, and the many tiny ways of attempting to bridge an impossible distance.
