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Flesh and Bone and Water

A Novel

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About The Book

From an exciting new voice in literary fiction, a seductive, dazzling, atmospheric story of family, class, and deception set against the mesmerizing backdrops of Rio de Janeiro, the Amazon River, and London.

André is a listless Brazilian teenager and the son of a successful plastic surgeon who lives a life of wealth and privilege, shuttling between the hot sands of Ipanema beach and his family’s luxurious penthouse apartment. In 1985, when he is just sixteen, André’s mother is killed in a car accident. Clouded with grief, André, his younger brother Thiago, and his father travel with their domestic help to Belem, a jungle city on the mouth of the Amazon, where the intense heat of the rainforest only serves to heighten their volatile emotions. After they arrive back in Rio, André’s father loses himself in his work, while André spends his evenings in the family apartment with Luana, the beautiful daughter of the family’s maid.

Three decades later, and now a successful surgeon himself, André is a middle-aged father, living in London, and recently separated from his British wife. He drinks too much wine and is plagued by recurring dreams. One day he receives an unexpected letter from Luana, which begins to reveal the other side of their story, a story André has long repressed.

In deeply affecting prose, debut novelist Luiza Sauma transports readers to a dramatic place where natural wonder and human desire collide. Cutting across race and class, time and place, from London to Rio to the dense humidity of the Amazon, Flesh and Bone and Water straddles two worlds with haunting meditations on race, sex, and power in a deftly plotted coming-of-age story about the nature of identity, the vicissitudes of memory, and how both can bend to protect us from the truth.

Excerpt

Flesh and Bone and Water ONE
André,

A few weeks ago, I looked you up online for the first time. It was easy to find you. There are many André Cabrals in the world, but not in Londres. I saw a photo of you. You look the same—just old. I am old too, unfortunately. I found your work address and your email, but it didn’t seem right, after so many years—email is too instant. So I’m writing you a letter.

Do you ever think of us? Probably not, but you should.

I know you’ve lived in Londres for many years and that you’re a doctor. Of course you are. You have two daughters, don’t you? That’s what I heard from your father, before he died. Two inglesinhas, who could have imagined it? It must be cold over there.

I’ve never been to Europe. I’ve never even left Brazil, but that’s OK—I never expected to. How could I complain? Look at where I’m living. It’s beautiful and safe. Children grow up wild, like Indians. You can smell the jungle wherever you go. I’m not at home at the moment, though. I’m in Belém, visiting my daughter.

One day I will come and see Europe: Paris, Londres, Ireland, Germany. My daughter, Iracema, would love that. (She’s training to be a doctor too. Isn’t that funny?) Those are the ones that appeal to me, the cold places, because I’ve never been cold. Let’s see. Though the few gringos who come here tell me not to bother—they prefer Brazil. Our country seduces them, makes them crazy. They don’t know what it’s really like.

I will write to you again. I have a lot to tell you. I will make you wait, just as you made us wait.

Luana

That was the first letter. I didn’t tell anyone about it. Not even my wife, Esther. The paper smelled woody, humid, faintly tropical. The past has a certain scent, don’t you think? To me, it smells like Brazil. I held the letter to my face, inhaled, and felt the years dissolve. I could be seventeen again, just a boy. I hadn’t seen Luana in almost thirty years. There was no return address.

I read the letter at work, between patients, read it again several times and stuffed it into the pocket of my blazer. It stayed there for a few weeks. Sometimes I would reach for it in my pocket, touch its edges, and feel my skin go numb. I wanted to look her up on the Internet, but I couldn’t remember her surname—or did I ever know it? Papai would have known, but he was long gone. To me she was just Luana. Luana Costa? Luana Santos? I tried some common surnames. Dozens of other Luanas stared back at me from my screen, posing in mirrors, pouting, younger than Luana would be now, older than she was back then.

If Mamãe hadn’t died, none of this would have happened. I would still be in Rio de Janeiro, married to a Brazilian woman from a good family, living in our old flat, overlooking the beach. My wife and I would have raised our children the way we had been raised—by benevolent black women who sleep in a small bedroom behind the kitchen. Dinner parties in Ipanema, Leblon, and Copacabana, weekends in Teresópolis and Búzios, and holidays in Europe, where we would dream of living.

Instead, I’m living alone in a one-bedroom flat on Albion Road in Stoke Newington, London. Esther still lives at our house on Winston Road, two minutes’ walk away—the house we bought after we got married twenty years ago, when it was still relatively cheap round here. Her family is nothing like mine—English and Jewish, or Jew-ish, as she used to say. We have two daughters, Beatriz and Hannah, and we raised them ourselves. Beatriz is named after Mamãe. I call her Bia; everyone else in England calls her Bee. She wouldn’t exist if Mamãe hadn’t died. Every day I walk to the practice, I walk home, I eat alone. My life is small and compact. My bedroom faces the road and I hear cars in my sleep. You wouldn’t believe the rent I’m paying for this shithole. Being a GP—tending to all those mad people and their non-illnesses—keeps me occupied for around 45 hours a week, but what about the other 123?

Mamãe died in a car accident in January 1985, on the street where I grew up. Everything was subsequent to that. The dictatorship ended that year, but I don’t remember how I felt about it. Mamãe was dead. What more was there to feel? Papai went back to his surgery. My brother, Thiago, and I went back to school. People remarked on how well we were coping. But we weren’t. Her absence was quiet and constant, like mild tinnitus. Our flat felt empty, even with five of us living there. Sometimes I thought I could hear her calling our maids, “Rita! Luana!”—her voice bright and rasping—or I’d see a flash of pink and orange in the corner of my eye. She loved bright colors. She always smiled. At night I could hear Thiago, who was six years old, crying in his bedroom, being sung to sleep by Rita. Crying was for women and children, so I didn’t cry. In my eyes, I wasn’t a child. I was a man without a mother. My seventeenth birthday came and went.

The last time I went to Brazil was for Papai’s funeral—he had a heart attack on my fortieth birthday. We canceled the party and flew to Rio, the whole family. It did make me wonder: Did he do it on purpose, to get my attention? I hadn’t been back for a while. That was six years ago. London is my home now. It’s been my home for a long time. I’m a British citizen—have been for years. It didn’t occur to me, when I left Brazil, that I would miss the place. I was only eighteen; what did I know? I wanted to get away from all the stupid things I’d done, and the people who knew about them. Now I find myself thinking, several times a day, about the green wildness of the trees on any street in Ipanema. Thin vines snaking around telephone lines. The sting of the Atlantic in my eyes. The people, their breezy manners.

In my dreams, everything about Brazil is exaggerated. The leaves are so green and the sea so blue. In one dream, it was raining and the sky was a stark gray. I was on Ipanema beach in my swimming shorts, feeling the downpour. All I knew was that I had to swim to Cagarras, the uninhabited archipelago that you can see from the shore. I waded into the water and swam towards the islands, my eyes open in the salt water. I climbed on land, lay down on the rocks, and felt the sun sizzle my skin, like bacon in a pan.

The Cagarras dream isn’t the important one. I’ve only had it twice. The important one is about our maid Luana, Rita’s daughter. Even before she started writing to me, I had been dreaming about her at least once a week. It was maddening. It goes like this: We’re swimming in the river, in the Amazon, trying to get to the other side. An impossible task, because the river is too wide. I’m seventeen years old again. My arms are slim, my chest hairless, my stomach flat. My young body is miraculous to me. Luana is swimming ahead and I can’t keep up. I can see her black hair, bobbing ahead in the distance. I sink to the riverbed, and cool water enters my lungs.

I first had that dream a year and a half ago, last July, after my forty-fifth birthday party. I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday, but Esther insisted. We were still together then. She was always good at parties, just like Mamãe. She organized the guest list, the Brazilian catering—salgadinhos, churrasco, caipirinhas—and booked the band, who played Brazilian songs in our living room. The musicians arrived an hour before the guests: two men and a woman, carrying instruments and amplifiers. Esther was upstairs getting ready, so I welcomed them into the house and performed the ritual of being Brazilian among other Brazilians—I was out of practice, it took some effort—laughing and joking, complaining about the weather, talking about where we were from. They were impressed that I’d been here for so long, that I was a British citizen. I told them that when I arrived in the eighties, I rarely saw other Brazilians in the street—not even tourists.

“And now we’re taking over Londres!” said the woman.

Carolina, that was her name. I looked at her, she smiled, and it hit me: she looked so much like Luana. Carolina had brown eyes, not green, and she wore her hair in long braids, not in a bun; her skin was darker, perhaps, and her lips didn’t have that deep curve, but when she smiled, meu Deus. She was talking about where she was from—Recife—and where she lived—Walthamstow—and I carried on nodding, responding, performing, but my body felt weak, my hearing muffled.

Luana. Our empregada, our maid. I hadn’t thought of her in years. OK, that’s not true. Of course I thought of her—how could I not?—but only briefly. Her face was just one of the hundreds that flipped through my mind on any given day: ex-girlfriends, dead relatives, long-lost friends, patients, and colleagues—but I tried not to linger on my memories of Luana, of what happened between us. When I met Esther, I locked those memories away at the back of my mind.

“Where should we set up?” said one of the other musicians, interrupting my thoughts.

That night, Esther wore a shimmering navy dress, her curly dark hair pinned up, her body slim and graceful; she walked, in heels, from group to group, making sure that everyone was having a good time. A few hours in, when everyone had been fed and greeted, I was nicely drunk. I spent much of the night in the kitchen, away from the band, from Luana’s double, but I could still hear her sweet voice, singing old Tom Jobim songs. Esther’s friend Nina dragged me back to the living room, shouting, “Stop hiding, André!” I gave a speech in which I declared my love for Esther and thanked her for throwing the party, then retired to the end of the garden to smoke a cigarette.

“Where have you been?” said Esther when I returned, holding an empty glass.

“Just getting some air.”

I took a bottle of prosecco from the table and refilled my glass.

She sniffed. “Have you been smoking?”

“I’ve only had one.”

“But you told me you were giving up.”

Next to us, on the makeshift dance floor, our daughters were dancing and singing along to the band’s rendition of “A Minha Menina” by Os Mutantes. Carolina was playing an egg shaker and singing backing vocals, but I kept my eyes on the girls. They didn’t speak Portuguese, but knew the words to a few songs—I raised them on Mamãe’s old records. Hannah was fifteen and Beatriz almost eighteen, not a child anymore. She resembled my mother, her namesake, the most, with her mercurial smile and long, thin limbs. Hannah wore thick glasses, as I did at her age, but the rest of her was pure Feldman, from her pale skin to her curious, headstrong nature.

“Look, Esther,” I said. “Look at them.”

Hannah pushed her glasses up her nose and waved at us. Esther laughed, her face radiant. I put my arm around her and she turned to kiss me. Everything would be fine. The night would end, the singer would go home, and Luana would return to the depths of my mind, a small bedroom behind the kitchen.

But I woke from the dream the next morning covered in sweat, my mouth dry, Luana’s face imprinted in my mind. Her face, not Carolina’s. We had been swimming in the Amazon, just as when we were teenagers. Esther had her back towards me, wearing a white vest, her skin tender and pale. I stroked her arm and she murmured.

“Good morning, querida,” I said.

She turned to face me, her eyes still closed and smudged with makeup, a small smile on her lips. Her dark curls were loose, spread across the pillow. Yes, life was better then.

“How’s your head?” I said.

“Not bad. And yours?”

Luana was from a different time and place, so far from London in 2013. More suited to dreams.

“Strangely, I feel fine,” I said. “Maybe not when I get up.”

“Urgh, do we have to get up?”

We had stayed up till 2:00 a.m., long after the band had left and the girls had gone to bed. A few friends had lingered (let’s be honest, they were more Esther’s friends than mine) to drink whiskey, smoke cigarettes and even, at one point, a joint. What had we talked about, for all those hours? I wasn’t sure, but I remembered a lot of laughter. I had played along, despite feeling as if I were elsewhere, watching the scene from another room, another continent.

“You look beautiful,” I whispered, trying to lock the memories back in their vault.

But they kept coming. I remembered another birthday: my eighteenth in Rio, the party I threw with Rita and Luana’s help, at our flat.

“Hmm, I bet I don’t,” said Esther, her eyes open a slit.

Luana in the river. Luana serving our meals, day after day. Luana after my party. Luana laughing like a child. She was a child and so was I.

Esther put an arm around my body and her lips to mine. Her eyes were now open. “Come on, before the kids wake up.”

I put my hand under her vest. We made love quickly, we knew exactly what the other wanted, but every few seconds, my mind wandered. To that birthday party, twenty-seven years before. Esther arched her back, her legs locked behind me. Finally I returned, for a minute or two, and belonged solely to the present.

But it didn’t last. She left me earlier this year, in June. It’s now December.

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for Flesh and Bone and Water includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. We hope that these questions will enrich your reading group’s conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

André is a listless Brazilian teenager and the son of a successful plastic surgeon who lives a life of wealth and privilege, shuttling between the hot sands of Ipanema beach and his family’s luxurious penthouse apartment in Rio. In 1985, when he is just sixteen, André’s mother is killed in a car accident. Clouded with grief, André, his younger brother, Thiago, and his father travel with their domestic help to Belém, a city at the mouth of the Amazon, where the intense heat of the rain forest only serves to heighten their volatile emotions. After they arrive back in Rio, André’s father loses himself in his work, while André spends his evenings in the apartment with Luana, the beautiful daughter of the family’s maid.

Three decades later, André is a successful doctor and a middle-aged father, living in London and recently separated from his British wife. He drinks too much wine and is plagued by recurring dreams. One day, he receives an unexpected letter from Luana, which begins to reveal the other side of their story, a story André has long repressed.

In deeply affecting prose, debut novelist Luiza Sauma transports us to a dramatic place where natural wonder and human desire collide. Cutting across race and class, time and place, from London to Rio to the dense humidity of the Amazon, Flesh and Bone and Water straddles two worlds with haunting meditations on race, sex, and power in a deftly plotted coming-of-age story about the nature of identity, the vicissitudes of memory, and how both can bend to protect us from the truth.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. On page 2, in the opening scene, André says, “The past has a certain scent, don’t you think? To me, it smells like Brazil.” In what ways are memories accessed through the senses in this novel? How does this inform the novel’s aesthetic?

2. We find André middle-aged and living alone in London at the beginning of the novel. How does this frame magnify the action set in Rio? How are the two spheres in dialogue?

3. Consider the ways in which André, Thiago, and Papai are shaped by grief. How does Mamãe’s death impact each character? What does the novel have to say about the mourning process?

4. On page 47, André notes, “I had struggled with the speedy grayness of London, the drab food and the language, slowly translating myself into someone who could belong.” How does this declaration capture the effect of geographic dislocation? Why is “translating” an apt word?

5. Sauma captures the full arc of André and Esther’s marriage, their romance and loss of love, in just a few pages. Do you think this compression was intentional? What effect does it have when juxtaposed with the story of André and Luana?

6. Why do you think the family escapes to Marajó after Mamãe’s death? Does the natural wonder of the Amazon serve as a motif? In what ways does this milieu reflect the distorted senses of a person in mourning?

7. Consider Papai’s abortion clinic. How does it reflect the capacity of secrets to both wound and heal? How does this theme play out in the novel?

8. Rita and Luana are both a part of the Cabral family and separate from it. In what scenes are invisible class boundaries trespassed?

9. What role does Thiago play in the novel? Does his character carry allegorical weight?

10. Did you see the novel’s dramatic twist coming? Did it feel earned? How did it fit thematically with the narrative?

11. In her email message to André, Luana writes on page 214, “I’m glad that you’re sorry, André, but I can’t forgive you.” What do you think Luana’s motives were for reaching out to André years later? What is André’s greatest sin? How did he wield his privilege in an unforgiveable way?

12. Were you satisfied with the novel’s ending? How is the empty Coke bottle an apt concluding image?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Pair Flesh and Bone and Water with a Pedro Almodóvar movie, such as Volver. How do Sauma and Almodóvar utilize the tropes of melodrama to offer commentary on sexual freedom?

2. Sauma was born in Rio but grew up in London. How do you think cultural duality shapes an artist?

3. Consider the works of Monica Ali, Kiran Desai, and Lisa See. What do the novels by these authors tell us about the immigrant experience? How does the past both haunt and inspire in these works?

About The Author

Photograph by Tim Goalen
Luiza Sauma

Luiza Sauma was born in Rio de Janeiro and raised in London. After studying English at the University of Leeds, she worked at the Independent on Sunday for several years. She has an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was awarded the Pat Kavanagh Award in 2014. She has also been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is the author of Flesh and Bone and Water and Everything You Ever Wanted.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Scribner (June 20, 2017)
  • Length: 272 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781501158025

Raves and Reviews

"Luiza Sauma's debut novel is that rare thing: a completely absorbing, brilliantly-designed, literary work. Her ability to cut across time and continents and to inhabit the physical and inner life of both a young Brazilian and that same man in middle-age is as dazzling as the novel's plot. The reveal, when it comes, is astonishing—sensuous, shocking, and completely earned."—Anita Shreve, New York Times bestselling author of The Pilot’s Wife and Stella Bain

"I devoured this stunning debut by Luiza Sauma. An immersive, heartbreaking coming of age story. Beg, borrow or steal a copy."--Susie Steiner, author of Missing, Presumed

“Luiza Sauma's first novel, Flesh and Bone and Water, is lush and evocative. The secret at the center came as a shocking surprise, and the characters were as haunted as I was. Sip a caipirinha and enjoy.”—Lisa See

"[Sauma's] writing is beautiful. I am sure I'll see her name on the spine of many a novel to come.--Rachel Seiffert, author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Dark Room

"Sauma's writing is sensual and evocative. Flesh and Bone and Water is a powerful depiction of sexual attraction and long lost loves; a haunting weave of Rio, the Amazon and present-day London."--Ardashir Vakil, award-winning author of Beach Boy

“An arresting debut about memory and trauma…resembles Julian Barnes’ 2011 Man Booker winner The Sense of an Ending.”--The Daily Telegraph

"A remarkable debut from Brazilian emigrée Luiza Sauma... a wonderful evocation of a privileged Ipanema beach childhood, a searing critique of a deeply divided society and – with its intoxicating combination of tropical heat and overpowering passions – the perfect beach read." – Mariella Frostrup, RadioTimes

"[In Sauma's] mysterious debut...Brazil is marvellously conjured: full of hot, smoky sunrises and manioc pancakes, chilled coconut milk and the salty violence of Ipanema.”-- The New Yorker

"Teenage love is well documented, but Sauma finds some interesting things to say about it in her debut novel... Sauma convincingly evokes the cacophony of Rio. Moving... it offers an indelible glimpses into Brazil's stratified society." --The Sunday Times

"Sauma's work is engaging, her descriptions of Rio evocative...attuned to the complexities of class and station."--Kirkus Reviews

"A confident debut...Sauma's excellent prose is thoroughly consuming, bouncing between continents and eras to create a complicated tale of class, ancestry, and love in which happy endings are difficult to find but hope remains."-- Publishers Weekly

"[A] quiet, inwardly focused, fast-moving, and well-plotted debut...Brazilian-born Sauma depicts her and her protagonist's vast, beguiling homeland with sweltering realism."-- Booklist

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