Island of the Dead     by Lya Luft, Translated by Cc Mclendon and Bj Craige Original title: O Quarto Fechado Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by University of Georgia Press Pub. Date: October 1986 Format: Hardcover, 106 pages ISBN: 0820308366 List Price: $17.95, £10.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £10.95 Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £15.95 Not available for ordering Published by Georgia UP Pub. Date: 1986 Pub. Place: USA Format: Hardcover, 112 pages Not available for ordering

Lya Luft is from Brazil’s extreme South, the city of Porto Alegre in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, a zone of Northern European immigration, famous for its German colonies. Luft’s writing seems to reflect the teutonic element and all her characters are enveloped by a gloomy northern fog of nameless unhappiness.

However, Island of the Dead, despite the gloom, is a concise minor masterpiece. The title refers to a copy of the famous painting ‘Island of the Dead’ by Arnold Böcklin which comes to dominate the thoughts of the main character, Renata. She is a woman who has arrived at a savage vision of marriage — she followed the emotional impulse to marry and have children but her marriage has turned into passionate hatred for her husband and herself. She has also emotionally rejected her children. Renata is a woman who has absolutely made the wrong move in marrying, violating her own nature, which is artistic and solitary.

This is a fascinating and fairly unusual theme and Luft has the courage as a writer to confront it unsparingly. Apart from the relationship of man and woman in marriage there is an exploration of other intimacies; that of brother and sister in a pair of twins who try to absorb each other absolutely; thereby experiencing a kind of ideal closeness, but it is an intimacy, a union of twin souls that is bought at the expense of everything else. Outside their symbiotic emotional affinity no real contact with any other reality is possible for them.

Overhanging the various kinds of failed relationships is a variety of ‘deaths’ that these failures of love have engendered; the husband Martin is emotionally dead, Clara, an elder daughter, is sexually dead, poisoned by a perverse liaison at the awakening of her sexuality, the twins are socially dead, another daughter Ella is mentally dead after an accident and one of the twins Camilo becomes actually dead.

Luft says here ‘all human relationships involve suffering’; an unfortunate truth everyone has to face sooner or later; Luft’s book is a brilliant, valid exploration of how and why that is true, in its way very life-affirming, warning us to steer towards achievable goals in our lives, rather than (ultimately poisonous) over-idealisations of love.

She had lived with him, slept with him, for many years and had made him suffer. With him she had gone from ecstasy to alienation, from passion to hatred, and with him she had seen disintegrate what they had built to last forever. But an interior gulf had never been overcome. Ardour and sweetness had turned to impatience, after being lovers they had become strangers. Whose fault was it?

A successful pianist, Renata had come down from the concert stage to Martin’s world, a matter-of-fact world of strength and rationality. But old enough to have her habits already ingrained. she hadn’t been able to change. She had tried to substitute her domestic life for her art, but very soon found her new surroundings vulgar. Until then she had concentrated on herself, she could not share herself with another. With so many demands on her now, she felt impotent.

No, love had not been enough. They had gone through all the stages of a slow, painful separation. They rarely saw each other; actually they avoided each other, fearing new scenes.

Years ago she had said, «I’m nor the type to get married,» seeing women her age surrounded by children. After marriage, too late, she realized that she had been right. Even though it could be lonely, difficult, and sterile, her art was less complex for her than human love. 7