No Dragons in Paradise

The thirteen stories of No Dragons in Paradise are about love. "Love and sex, love and death, love and abandonment, love and joy, love and memory, love and fear, love and madness," Caio Fernando Abreu writes in his epigraph. The stories can be read independently. Stories of a twelve-year-old boy's first, intense crush on a teen named Beatriz, whose allure prompts him to look up the word "starlet" in the dictionary; of a Queen of the Night searching for sex; of a young man visiting his isolated mother; and of a tenderness between two lonely men in the middle of the night, Or read as a novel, as Abreu suggests we might, the stories form a propulsive and psychedelic narrative of shame, longing, passion, and abandonment. His sentences are charted by the stars. Two people fall in love on "a Pisces afternoon," and in a fictionalized Brazilian city, tarot cards, cowrie shells, and pendulums mend a broken heart. A glance between potential lovers is often accompanied by the rasp of Billie Holiday or the honeyed croons of Brazilian bossa nova singer Nara Leão. And spinning, half-dazed, this same pair might take a break from the dance floor to discuss Pessoa and Lispector. For Abreu, life is astonishing, mystical, and arousing. And to love is to read, to listen, and to touch.