Pulling back the curtain

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This article was published 09/08/2025 (378 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Award-winning Brazilian novelist, journalist and short-story writer Eliana Alves Cruz published her first novel, Água de Barella, in 2015, followed by another two novels and a book of stories. She is widely recognized in Brazil, as she should be.

Solitaria, the first of her books to be translated into English, is quickly bringing her the wider audience she so richly deserves — and exposing from the inside, and as if for the first time, the charged torsions of the distinctively Brazilian versions of class and caste, racism and race.

Solitaria is unnervingly stark and simple in structure. It’s narrated in three parts by three voices in sequences of no more than three pages each.

The first 15 episodes are in Mabel’s voice. The little girl is Eunice’s daughter; the pair are Black domestics in a rich white Brazilian couple’s apartment in an unnamed big city in the south of Brazil.

Eunice’s voice narrates the second part of the novel; the third, from which the title derives, is narrated by the series of solitary “little-rooms” inhabited by domestics — historically and today. Evoking solitary confinement, “Solitária” signals the sites of isolation of Brazilians like Eunice and Mabel, servants confined to tiny compartments in the rear of opulent apartments.

That Alves Cruz gives these “little-rooms” their own narrative power and presence is resonant: in Brazil these spaces are mute witness to generations of suffering — like that of the woman imprisoned in another apartment since she was 10.

The tensions in Mabel and Eunice’s family speak to today’s Brazil as to Brazilian history. The father, an expert and loving gardener, drinks too much and eventually is forced to abandon his family. Eunice’s mother lives with her daughter and granddaughter in a little house in the far suburbs, from which they travel hours to the apartment where they work.

The traditional caste of service people populate their layer of the apartment block: the building superintendent Jurandir and his two boys, Cacau and João Pedro, add another turn to the plot as Mabel becomes pregnant as a teenager with João Pedro’s baby, while Mabel and Cacau eventually break free from their respective confinements through years of hard study and determination. Jurandir’s sons represent two possible avenues of escape for Mabel — one, passionate anger and rebellion, the other determination and endurance.

A further elaboration of plot develops through Ms. Lucia, the rich boss and Tiago, her lawyer husband, who struggle to conceive a child; their hyper-spoiled daughter Camila comes to play a vital part in the second of the novel’s twinned tragedies involving children. (Readers will have to discover these transparent and telling developments for themselves.)

Meanwhile Ms. Lucia plays her own duplicitous role in helping Mabel abort, later scornfully revealing her complicity to Eunice. That first cover-up anticipates the larger and ultimately unsuccessful attempt of the rich couple at concealment of their family’s role in the novel’s final tragedy.

There is an overarching message of hope in Solitaria: as is the case in contemporary Brazil, a series of exacting laws is enacted to legislate and improve the terrible working conditions, including salary, of domestics (even if under-the-table arrangements continue to undermine this new regime); and the machinations of Ms. Lucia and Tiago to conceal their daughter’s complicity in the culminating tragedy are exposed, as is the pathetic condition of the imprisoned woman in another apartment.

The translation of Solitaria by Benjamin Brooks is excellent for the most part, although it is unnecessarily marred by leaving some popular lyrics in Portuguese, to little positive effect. But that does not impede the forceful progress of the narration.

Alves Cruz pulls no punches. No reader will be in any way confused by the novel’s clear message, if fiction does indeed convey a “message:” Solitaria announces on every page that the Brazil so long idealized, from the perennially false fables of racial harmony to the sultry languor of bossa nova lyrics, is a Brazil that never was. Alves Cruz’s Brazil pulses with vital and dangerous but real hope.

Writer and translator Neil Besner grew up in Rio de Janeiro and returns there frequently.