A Brief History of Yes

A Brief History of Yes

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A Brief History of Yes tells the story of the break-up between a Portuguese woman named Maria and an unnamed American man: it is a collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form perfectly captures the workings of attraction and grief . . .


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Micheline Marcom describes her newest novel, A Brief History of Yes—her first since 2008's scathing and erotic The Mirror in the Well—as a "literary fado," referring to a style of Portuguese music that, akin to the American blues, is often melancholic and soulful, and encapsulates the feeling of saudade—meaning, loosely, yearning and nostalgia for something or someone irreparably lost. A Brief History of Yes tells the story of the break-up between a Portuguese woman named Maria and an unnamed American man: it is a collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form perfectly captures the workings of attraction and grief, proving once again that American literature has no better poet of love and loss than Micheline Aharonian Marcom.

"The book is slender, yet dense with language of a high register (...) Marcom sucks her readers into a world of grief, where the minor events of the dramatic present—Maria reading in a café, or picking her son up at school, or taking photographs of herself “to see herself better”—are suffused and subsumed by Maria’s recursive memories of her childhood in Portugal and her year-long relationship with her lover. What happens both in the dramatic present and in the past gets told in present tense, which creates a blurred sense of temporal reality and evokes the strange workings of time in the universe of grief."–A'Dora Phillips, Kenyon Review