Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma is a nice novel to know a new point of view about society. Particulary about one related to Brazil. This is a good reason to get this book. Besides, Luiza Sauma has also the point of view about migration, having moved to London. Her experiences are reflected on the novel.

The premise feels unwieldy - if you can't write a clear book description it normally means there's an issue with the book. The letter at the beginning is too contrived. All in all, it didn't draw me in. Sorry. DNF

A story about a Brazilian doctor living in London who receives a letter that brings back difficult memories of his past. A coming of age novel in flashbacks, this concise book explores our ideas about the past and how our decisions have affected not only other people but also our future selves.

What I loved about this novel was how it made Brazil come alive. The author did a great job of describing the culture, the people, and the social system in place. There were a lot of things that I did not know about Brazil that I know now after reading this novel, for which I am grateful to have had the opportunity. However, I didn't like the story. This was probably because I didn't like André. When he is describing himself as a teenager, you get the impression that he was a self-obsessed boy. Not much has changed in his adulthood. I found his character to be annoyingly selfish and prone to being melodramatic. The story was also not that unique, so I really wasn't too interested in what was happening to the characters. The dialogue between the characters was also emotionless and that struck me as odd, since this story pretty much demands passion. Overall, this was just an okay novel - and that's only because of the great setting the author created. However, the story itself failed in execution. For those reasons, I'm giving this a 1.5/5 stars.

I did not know what I was getting into, and I didn't like it.

Well written and detailed, this is a novel with a glimpse of class and race in Brazil. It is beautiful and painful reminder about our families and how they can be our biggest supporters or the ones capable of destroying us.

First published in Great Britain in 2017; published by Scribner on June 20, 2017

Flesh and Bone and Water tells a big story in a small way. The novel is a family drama, focusing on one family member and the harm he inadvertently does to his family and future by falling in love.

André Cabral receives a letter from Luana in Brazil. Now living alone in a London flat after separating from his wife, André has not seen Luana in 30 years. He cannot remember her last name, but the letter prompts memories of his Brazilian childhood.

Luana was the daughter of his family’s black maid/nanny. Most of the novel is told in memory: André and his brother Thiago growing up in Rio; their mother’s death; a family visit to Belém, accompanied by Luana; André’s introduction to Esther, his eventual wife, as he attends medical school in London; the deterioration of their marriage as “time rubs away the shine” of love.

Most of the backstory involves André’s forbidden infatuation. Luana is the daughter of a servant and not a fit mate for a boy who will one day become a doctor. But Luana is wrong for André for additional reasons that he does not understand at the time. Eventually, as more letters arrive, André learns a devastating truth about his past.

The story is told in quiet, straightforward prose. There is no melodrama in André’s account of a dramatic moment in his childhood and a dramatic revelation in the present. Much of the novel’s dramatic tension comes from André’s decision to confront the past that he fled when, to his father’s dismay, he settled down in London. There is no going back for André, even when eventually returns to Brazil with his daughter to make an attempt to atone. Like the rest of us, the best André can do is to feel his way forward as he works to reconcile has past and his present. The story's strength lies in its ability to convey a universal message in a personal way.

RECOMMENDED

This book is more like 3.5 stars for me. I find this to be a hard book to review because while I enjoyed the prose, I found the story to be lacking in story and concept. Overall, I enjoyed following André's emotional journey after he lost his mom, felt disconnected from his dad, and grappled with his lust for Luana. Racial relations and privilege are obviously major themes in this book, as André is a white Brazilian boy who lusts after the daughter of his family's Black maid. However, I feel like Sauma could have done a little more to reflect on André's obsessions after he moved to London and address his privilege and race. There is a lot of potential in this story that I feel Sauma could have given more attention to so as to make the messages more clear. It otherwise was a nice story to follow even if it felt fairly generic.

4.5 stars

With this novel, Luiza Sauma writes a gripping and layered piece about loss and grief, identity, race, class, privilege. There are so many important and thought-provoking themes explored in this book, all intertwined with a compelling storyline. I can't get it off my mind.

This book started well and I was really drawn in by the quality of the writing. The narrative about the protagonist's early life was absorbing and entertaining, and vividly created South American society.

However, I felt it lingered too long on the protagonist's obsession with his maid. It was both uncomfortable and laborious, ultimately distracting from the quality of the writing.

The writing was good but the story just wasn't for me, I'm afraid.

Callous privileged youth becomes callous privileged adult who finds himself reflective at long last. This is well written and worthy largely for the Brazilian sections. It's really about race and class than love or regret. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC of this short novel. It's hard to categorize or place in a genre (coming of age/realization?) but it's worth your time for the journey to an (at least for me) unfamiliar setting.

Flesh and Bone and Water starts off with a series of letters to Andre, the book's wealthy narrator who lives in London after leaving Brazil as a teenager. The letters are from his former empregada (housekeeper) that he grew up alongside, Luana. She reveals some shocking news to him over time. The book flips between past and present, with majority of it highlighting Andre's teenage years in Brazil. As the son of a successful plastic surgeon for a father and a recently deceased mother, he finds much of his life revolving around trying to please his father by studying for a medical career in addition to lethargically hanging around friends. He finds himself drawing closer and closer to his beautiful black housekeeper, Luana, but such a relationship forms major consequences.

I really enjoyed how colorful and vibrant Brazil was portrayed. In contrast to the grey London, there was a true sense of "home" reflected in the setting. The writing itself was also memorable even when there was little action. I wished there was a more fleshed out ending, however; the story would have benefited from a few more details or a stronger conclusion. I also felt like some characters were mentioned and soon forgotten, causing me to wonder why they were included in the first place. Nevertheless, I'd still recommend the book, especially for the lyrical prose.

Flesh and Bone and Water is short and focused, just like its title. Andre was born in Brazil and now works in London. Through his first person narrative, we learn about what led him to leave Brazil permanently in his late teens. This was a good book to read on a lazy Sunday. Andre is flawed both as a teenager and as an adult, but there's something sympathetic about him. Through his eyes, I felt like I was getting a glimpse at a slice contemporary Brazil -- including a micro exploration of issues of class, race and gender. Mind you, it's not a didactic story -- it remains a novel with what feel like real emotions and a mystery at its core. Definitely worth reading. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

This book was not for me, and I can't say I would recommend it to anyone.

I was provided this book by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

There's something well intentioned here but the.novel feels dreary and inward looking. It doesn't pull the reader in or animate.

I enjoyed the author's style but overall found the story a bit of a bore. Brazil is a lovely setting for a book. I suppose I am just a bit tired of rich people problems. Rich man problems are kind of passé, no?

Something about the liquid imagery and cryptic title drew me to this novel. London has a big Brazilian community so I was curious to read about that cross-cultural experience as well. The novel centres around Andre, a Brazilian man in his later years who has lived his whole adult life in the UK. But he was raised in a privileged white upper-middle class family in Rio de Janeiro. There his family had a maid or an “empregada” named Rita and her mixed-race daughter Luana who also served the family. Andre hasn’t had contact with Luana for many years, but recently he’s received letters from her and it’s forced him to revisit a past which he’s denied throughout his life. Gradually the story of his tumultuous teenage years is revealed and the reason why he’s so stridently distanced himself from his country of birth and his family. It’s a novel that comes with a gripping twist which creates a complex picture of love.

In its concept this book is somewhat similar to Julian Barnes’ novel “The Sense of an Ending” for the way the story forces a man to radically reconsider the dramatic choices he made in his youth. It also teasingly questions our perception of what’s happening around us in relation to how those events are cemented in our collective idea of history. Andre reflects “Young people don’t know the importance of things when they’re happening, but when those images still play in your mind long after your hair’s gone grey and your belly slack, that’s when you know.” It’s fascinating the way events which seem trivial or circumstantial can inflate into having a greater importance we never could have attributed to them at the time. Andre discovers certain facts about the past and what was lost which make him see his life in a more rounded way and develop an empathy for other people’s perspectives.

Part of what motivated Andre’s emotional decisions in his youth was the sudden death of his mother which we learn about quite early in the novel. It left a teenage Andre and his younger brother to be raised by his workaholic father Matheus so that they lived in an entirely male household. Andre’s sharp memories of his mother are beautifully rendered: “Even now, I can see my mother and hear her loud voice, her heels clicking on the floor. She’s like a pop song, the melody and lyrics imprinted in my mind.” There also existed in their household the female presences of Rita and her daughter Luana, but there’s an awkward tension here as they navigate the intimacies of home life, the formality of the women as servants and the developing sexual attraction between Andre and Luana. The dynamic of these relationships highlight the strident class system in place in Brazil at that time.

Matheus worked as a plastic surgeon and it’s also interesting to see the way the class of people their family socialized with was so obsessed with appearance and beauty. However, Andre’s father also had a clandestine after-hours job delivering abortions. Abortion is a controversial issue and laws concerning it are in the process or being amended – where traditionally abortion has only been legal there if the pregnancy puts the woman’s life in danger or if that pregnancy was the result of rape. However, these issues aren’t explored in the novel and I would have been fascinated to read about them – especially as a counterpart to my recent reading of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel “A Book of American Martyrs.” The middle of Sauma’s novel lags somewhat as its concerned more with mundane details about tensions in Luana and Andre’s relationship rather than these more complex social issues. However, I can see why the author chose to focus exclusively on the issue of their affair because otherwise it would have become a very different kind of novel. And when the twist comes in this book I was wholly invested and thoroughly gripped. After this point the revelations unfold thick and fast. It’s a promising debut novel and I hope to read more by Sauma in the future.

Not my thing. Too gritty and dark. I also think a lot was lost in translation here.

Library thing review

Luiza Sauma’s Flesh and Bone and Water read like a primitive high school essay that could possibly have be entitled: “My Memories of Growing Up and How I Ended Up Here.” Honestly, that title makes it sound a bit more interesting than it was for most of the novel. While there were a few glimmering moments of promise, this horse never truly broke out into a run for me—there were times when it never even left the stable.

While this novel is, at its core, a novel about race in class—the line between the rich and the poor, the light-skinned and the dark-skinned in Brazil—it didn’t come with a lot of depth. The storyline was basic; Andre is the quintessential rich boy who’s bored of the parties around him and is surprised that his maid has a life of her own outside of washing his clothes and cooking his meals. He’s the kind of teenager who’s spoiled and curious and sheltered, the kind who plans to raise his children the same way he was raised: by a black woman who sleeps in a small room behind the kitchen. In short, he was pretty annoying and flat for pretty much all of the novel. (view spoiler)

The dialogue was so basic and one-dimensional that it was practically elementary and definitely added nothing whatsoever to the plot, tension or emotion of the novel as a whole. In fact, I found myself thinking more times than is even acceptable, “Is this a novel in translation?” because at least that would explain the lack of…anything present here. Perhaps it was, quite literally, just lost in translation. (Because I can find no evidence to the contrary, I’ve come to believe that this is not, actually, a translation.) Flesh and Bone and Water instead was delivered like a pretty lackluster, definitely watered-down version of a Hanif Kureishi novel, and I was ready to put it down before I got one-fifth of the way through it. Really, nothing truly happened in this novel until over halfway through it. The storyline from there could have been truly heartwarming if handled differently. Instead, it read as rushed at times and stale pretty much throughout, aside from a few more-polished moments.

Luiza Sauma’s Flesh and Bone and Water was tangible proof that a great idea does not a great novel make. It takes more than that; it takes finesse and heart and skill, which this novel didn’t display an extraordinary level of dexterity with. If you’re looking for a simple novel—the kind to make you say aaawwww when two teenagers kiss behind hanging laundry, then this may very well be a novel of interest for you. However, if you’re a reader who is looking to sink their teeth into something—to follow and love and root for your characters with the same passion for them that they exude as characters on the pages—then I bid you think twice about this one. It’s about as bare bones (no pun intended) as a burlap sack. 2 stars **