The Love of Singular Men

by Victor Heringer, James Young (Translator)

Overview

The gripping English debut of the famous and hugely talented Brazilian writer Victor Heringer, who died tragically young. 

In the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, one summer in the 1970s, a family—a husband and wife, their daughter, and their crippled teenage son Camilo—take in an orphan named Cosme. The boys unexpectedly fall in love, but an act of violence shatters their intimate world and changes their lives forever. Decades later, when Camilo returns to his hometown, he is haunted by his first love and the long shadow of Brazil’s military dictatorship. At once an incisive and unforgiving study of Brazilian society and a fluid, queer coming-of-age story, Victor Heringer’s exhilarating and moving novel is worthy of Machado de Assis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811237482
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/04/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	461,890
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

The writer and multimedia artist Victor Heringer was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1988. His debut novel Glória was awarded the 2013 Premio Jabuti. The Love of Singular Men was published by Companhia das Letras in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Sao Paulo Prize for Literature, the Rio Prize for Literature, and the Oceanos Prize. Tragically, Heringer took his own life in 2018.
James Young is a writer, translator, and editor from Belfast, Ireland.

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/30/2023

This outstanding posthumous English-language debut from Heringer (1988–2018) revolves around a Brazilian boy’s life-changing summer. Told in short, punchy sections, the narrative leaps back and forth between two time periods. In the first, set during Brazil’s military dictatorship, it’s 1976 and 13-year-old Camilo meets Cosme, a boy who’s new to Queím, their suburb on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Camilo is just beginning his journey of sexual self-discovery and finds himself magnetically drawn to Cosme, but their time together is abruptly and shockingly severed. In the second timeline, set three decades later, Camilo returns home (“I want to die right where I was born. Everyone likes a little symmetry”), wracked by obsessive, painful thoughts of Cosme, and crosses paths with a boy named Renato, who has a connection to Cosme. Heringer writes beautifully about the relationship between Camilo and Cosme (“My Cosme disappeared and I stayed, like an amputated octopus tentacle, which stays alive even after it’s cut off”), and never lets the heavy subject matter weigh things down too much. It’s a hypnotic and playful depiction of love’s seismic forces. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"The novel’s genius emerges from this condition of abject solitude: attempting to write his way out of a world in “perpetual moral hangover,” Heringer finds beauty and humor even in tragedy."

The Baffler - Adam Morris

"Grand and strangely devastating."

The Way of All Flesh - The New York Review of Books - Charlie Lee

"Heringer's writing is a braid of the tirelessly hilarious and the deadly serious."

The Bay Area Reporter - Tim Pfaff

"The brief, precise scenes – incorporating photos, lists and handwritten passages – enable Heringer to cover a great deal in a short space and make a potentially gloomy story into a multilayered celebration of life. That the author died in 2018, aged 29, is a loss to international literature."

The Guardian - John Self

"When you read something genuinely new it's hard to describe it - you end up settling for comparisons - and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It's ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind."

Zadie Smith

"Heringer once said that he loved the serendipity of creation, like exploring a mountain and discovering new places to twist your ankle. His commitment to heterodoxy, singularity and incongruity made him an artist of the loose end. He killed himself aged twenty nine, when he was beginning to make his name. Perhaps the ‘who knows why’ that whispers through all his work applies also to this."

New Left Review - Lorna Scott Fox

"Heringer had little time to live, but he marked an entire generation of writers and readers. "

O Globo

"It’s the first book in a long time I’ve wanted to read again the moment I finished it. … The book’s texture is marvelously diffuse and porous, allowing wild movements through (and juxtapositions of) time…I can’t think of many pages in books I’ve read in recent years that are such pure demonstrations of virtuosity."

Garth Greenwell

"One of the best novels in recent years."

Asymptote