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The Words That Remain explores the universal power of the written word and language, and how they affect all our relationships.
A letter has beckoned to Raimundo since he received it over fifty years ago from his youthful passion, handsome Cícero. But having grown up in an impoverished area of Brazil where the demands of manual labor thwarted his becoming literate, Raimundo has long been unable to read. As young men, he and Cícero fell in love, only to have Raimundo's father brutally beat his son when he discovered their affair. Even after Raimundo succeeds in making a life for himself in the big city, he continues to be haunted by this secret missive full of longing from the distant past. Now at age seventy-one, he at last acquires a true education and the ability to access the letter.
Exploring Brazil's little-known hinterland as well its urban haunts, this is a sweeping novel of repression, violence, and shame, along with their flip side: survival, endurance, and the ultimate triumph of an unforgettable figure on society's margins.
National Book Awards, 2023
"Auspicious debut ... This wistful novel introduces a worthy new voice." —Publishers Weekly
"Disarmingly tender and feverishly sad, Gardel's love story is a delirium of a novel that reminds its readers of an uncomfortable truth: that even a life of regret can be a beautiful one." —Patrick Nathan, author of Some Hell
"Incredible debut work ... Packs a literal and figurative punch ... Through swirling reflections, the novel moves like a steady whirlwind, conveying inner turmoil and external inaction, punctuated by powerful sometimes devastating change." —Asymptote
"Poetic and intense." —University of Southern California literary journal Air/Light
"An LGBTQ+ novel from Brazil, The Words That Remain is about the damage that brutality, illiteracy and widespread homophobia do to self-love and happiness; it also illustrates the resilience of wanting to love and to be loved and accepted by oneself." —Foreword Reviews
"A heartbreaking debut novel ... The Words That Remain is not just a love story but an expression of queer desire, struggle, and resilience in spaces outside of romantic love. Gardel's text and Lobato's translation create a puzzle that the reader is trying to solve ... Through this process the reader is brought along on the journey of companionship, family, and love." —Reading in Translation
"Gardel's ferocious debut novel roars from a deep pit of longing and puts repressed desire in a chokehold, mining it for any and all of its redemptive qualities. Despite its brevity, the novel feels like an epic." —Necessary Fiction
"A powerful story of the pain of marginalization: the marginalization of poverty, illiteracy, isolation, prejudice, in the tradition of the great Brazilian storytellers." —Socorro Aciol, author of The Head of the Saint
"In this novel, writing means life. There isn't a single word in it that isn't poetry."—Folha de São Paulo
"Touching on love, identity, acceptance, and violence and social exclusion, and offering a deep portrait of Brazil—giving special attention to those living in the margins—[The Words that Remain] is ingeniously woven out of a voice as tender as it is wounded."—Diário do Nordeste
This information about The Words That Remain was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stênio Gardel was born in 1980 in the rural northeast of Brazil. The Words That Remain is his first novel.
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