AS IF BY MAGIC

A collection of four narratives that are like literary labyrinths from which there is no way out.

A love of wordplay and the process of storytelling illuminates these pieces. The concluding The Magic Eye—a novella longer than the three preceding entries combined—presents a protagonist who is a writer of stories much like the Brazilian author’s. He describes life as “a set of building blocks,” as well as “a blindfolded race” and “a puzzle in which certain pieces are left out.” The protagonist is not only the writer of this narrative but a character within it, responding to the turns of plot dictated by a dream his wife has shared with him and a visit from their building’s superintendent, who was also in her dream. Within these layers of narrative, they have been isolated from the outside world by pandemic and quarantine, the two of them trapped within their apartment, where he is trapped inside his head with his sentences and story line: “stories interwoven with dreams and nightmares he had no control over.” He ultimately arrives at “a different view, according to which life could take on the form of an endless canvas, where fiction and reality merged with the inconsistency of dreams.” He seems like an extension of the protagonist of an earlier story, “Albatross,” about a writer (with a dreaming wife) who inherits an island that he’s told is deserted, where he encounters some unexpected visitors. The first and shortest story, “Remains From the Fair,” features a man whose father has Alzheimer’s disease, but a visit from the police suggests that the protagonist is himself confused by his tenuous hold on reality. “Turn of the River” is both the slightest and most fantastical, about an orphan in the jungle who builds his own plane.

Written with care and clarity, each story is something of a puzzle that becomes more puzzling as it proceeds.