April 5, 2010
In his first novel, memoirist Sledge (Mother and Son
) imagines the life of poet Elizabeth Bishop and her lover, socialite and architect Lota de Macedo Soares, while they lived together in Brazil during the 1950s and '60s. Both women struggle with their demons as, from a remote mountain compound in Samambaia (where Lota has designed and built a glass house), Elizabeth wins the Pulitzer Prize and Lota rises to power in the turbulent political sphere of Rio de Janeiro. The book imagines much of the couple's tumultuous, tragically short relationship, based partially on Elizabeth's surviving letters, journals, and drafts (though her correspondence with Lota was burned by Lota's ex-lover). Sledge gives contour to their lives while artfully evoking Brazil's “primeval” rural landscape and uniquely urbane Rio (“half jungle” and “half twentieth-century megalopolis”), and peppers his narrative with appearances by notable contemporaries like Robert Lowell and Frank O'Hara. This is not the first fictionalized history of the couple during this period (when Bishop wrote Questions of Travel
and “The Scream”), but Sledge delivers a sensitive and engrossing variation.
June 1, 2010
Sledge (Mother and Son: A Memoir, 1995) turns his gaze southward to re-create the passionate love affair between Elizabeth Bishop and Brazilian Lota de Macedo Soares.
Elizabeth and Lota had briefly met each other at a social function in New York, so when in 1951, at the age of 40, Elizabeth goes to Rio to visit some friends, it's both likely and logical that she would renew her acquaintance with Lota, an immensely wealthy aristocrat and political firebrand. Besotted with modern architecture, Lota is building a glass house in Samambaia, in the jungle, where Elizabeth joins her—and Elizabeth essentially doesn't go home for the next 17 years. The relationship is complicated, in part because of Lota's fiery personality. She recognizes Elizabeth's genius and encourages, coaxes and beguiles her into writing more poetry, but she's both concerned and horrified by Elizabeth's severe alcoholism. (At one point Elizabeth justifies her craving by claiming that "drinking...provided a context, a frame, if you required one, for the disorganized desire to cause injury to yourself, operating somewhat like the formal structure of a poem.") For her part, Elizabeth wants to give herself over to the intensity of a love relationship, but Lota alternates between being clingy and erratic. The political situation in Brazil is volatile, though eventually Lota gets a place in the new order. As always, she's both imperious and seductive—and she definitely likes to get her way—but the energy she invests in political commitments and maneuverings diminishes her relationship with the poet. After a short stint teaching at the University of Washington, Elizabeth returns to Brazil, feeling that she's failed as a teacher. She comes back to discover Lota in ill health and begins to nurse her, though much to Lota's rage she still can't control her almost constant need for drink. Close to death, Lota hurries the process by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
A moving novel of an illicit and impassioned relationship.
(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
June 1, 2010
The intensely private and much-revered real-life poet Elizabeth Bishop is vividly and imaginatively portrayed in Sledges debut novel about Elizabeths time in Brazil and her lengthy relationship with the riveting, mercurial Lota de Macedo Soares. Elizabeth travels to the half-wild, half-civilized megalopolis of Rio in the 1950s, and into the arms of the enticing Lota, the woman with whom she ends up living in a glass house in the Samambaian hills. Lotas ceaseless motion, with its germ of desperation, heightened Elizabeths chronic anxiety, which she remedied by drinking herself numb to her self-doubt. Sledges cinematic novel is as lush and fecund as the jungle itself, with its innumerable fruits, ferns, and hidden dangers, leaving readers with the indelible image of a brilliant, tormented woman writing tirelessly through the tropic night by the light of a kerosene lamp, her creativity fueled by an injection of cortisone (for asthma) plus two ccs of adrenaline, a whiff of norisodrine sulphate, and a blast of gin and tonic. Strong and intoxicating indeed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)