Almino
2014 Nominated

The Book of Emotions

Translated from the original Portuguese by Elizabeth Jackson
artwork-image

ABOUT
THE BOOK

Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions “a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera.” Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. João Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR João
Almino

Brazilian novelist and diplomat João Almino has written three volumes of essays and five of philosophy in addition to his five novels Brasilia Quintet, of which Dalkey has published the last two, The Book of Emotions and Free City.  He has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, UNAM, the University of Brasilia, and the University of Chicago.  Among other awards, Almino won the 2003 Casa de las Américas Award for The Five Seasons of Love and the 2011 Prêmio Passo Fundo Zaffari and Bourbon de Literatura for Free City.

Brazilian novelist and diplomat João Almino has written three volumes of essays and five of philosophy in addition to his five novels Brasilia Quintet, of which Dalkey has published the last two, The Book of Emotions and Free City.  He has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, UNAM, the University of Brasilia, and the University of Chicago.  Among other awards, Almino won the 2003 Casa de las Américas Award for The Five Seasons of Love and the 2011 Prêmio Passo Fundo Zaffari and Bourbon de Literatura for Free City.

ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Elizabeth
Jackson

NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

João Almino achieves with this book fictional maturity and reveals his ability to write a delicate story but still a strong one, intertwining lives and times.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Date published
07/02/2012
Country
Brazil
Original Language
Portuguese
Author
Publisher
Dalkey Archive Press
Translator
Elizabeth Jackson
Translation
Translated from the original Portuguese by Elizabeth Jackson

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