So Many People, Mariana

by Maria Judite de Carvalho

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Pub Date Oct 10 2023 | Archive Date Oct 20 2023

Description

Long discounted by a literary culture that actively rejected women’s writing, Maria Judite de Carvalho’s biting and bitterly funny work has since exploded across the world. Collecting the entirety of her short works written between 1959 and 1967, when the Salazar dictatorship and the rigid edicts of the Catholic church reigned, the stories in So Many People, Mariana might as well have been written today. These are tough, unflinching accounts of women trapped by a culture that values them as workers or wives but not as people. And if they do escape their circumstances, they are, more often than not, irrevocably punished by the world.

So Many People, Mariana is an introduction to a major international writer at the height of her power. Translated by the renowned Margaret Jull Costa, Carvalho leads readers into the dark of life under patriarchal capitalism, writing “as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy” (New York Review of Books).

Advance Praise

“Maria Judite de Carvalho’s writing comes out of restriction and confinement, both personal and political. But as I read her stories, I find her way of looking so unsparingly into our shared human darkness brings me comfort and awe and at times even makes me laugh out loud.” —Karolina Ramqvist, author of The Bear Woman

“These stories are bold and unsparing, quietly devastating. A fearless exploration of longing and the claustrophobia of loneliness.” —Kayla Maiuri, author of Mother in the Dark

Praise for Maria Judite de Carvalho and Empty Wardrobes

“Empty Wardrobes will give you a sense of domestic life under the dictatorship: In precise, unsentimental prose, it tells the story of three generations of women overshadowed by the death of a patriarch.” —Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, New York Times

“Executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy…There is no doubting the authenticity of Carvalho’s vision and the originality and severity of her voice, as scathing and pitiless in her depiction of ‘empty’ women as in her depiction of oafish swaggering machismo.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“A book about how men betray women, and how women betray each other…a work that does not hesitate to expose the cruelties and power grabs that lie beneath marriage, and how quickly society discards aging women.” —Rhian Sasseen, The Paris Review

“The specter of the patriarchy looms over this mid-20th century tale like depression itself. With the astringent wit of Natalia Ginzburg, Empty Wardrobes is a spellbinding book of domestic disorder that sparks with bitterness and humor.” —Lauren LeBlanc, Observer