In Blue Light Hours, the debut novel by National Book Award-winning translator Bruna Dantas Lobato, a young woman moves 4,000 miles away from her home in Natal, Brazil to live in a small town in Vermont where she attends a liberal arts college to study literature.
She gravitates to the other international students and forms tenuous friendships with her classmates. She marvels at what is plentiful in this new place, including the food she can have in the cafeteria, the books she has to read, the papers she writes in the 24-hour library.
She is a dedicated student. There are parties, of course, in this college setting, but there is a constant tension even in her leisurely pursuits as she has “a visa status to maintain, and any academic or disciplinary issues could result in termination, expulsion, or deportation.”
The book covers roughly a full year of the young woman’s life. She has no real relationship with her father but maintains regular contact with her mother through Skype. They visit this way and connect almost daily. They drink a cup of tea together—each in her respective space a world apart. Sometimes in the evenings each enjoys a drink of whiskey and dozes off comfortably to the sound of the voice of the other. Sometimes the mother sleeps. Sometimes it is the daughter who cannot keep her eyes open. The blue light of the computers is a constant in their shared moments.
Over time, each person changes. In moments, we see how their lives are diverging. The daughter slips and speaks in English to her mother who requires the Portuguese translation. The daughter looks around for something to read to her mother and realizes all her books are in English.
I first became interested in the work of Bruna Dantas Lobato when I read her story, “Snowstorm” in an August 11, 2022 issue of The New Yorker. I found it to be told in a compelling classic mode—and the author has extended and expanded that story to create this beautiful, poignant novel—one that also includes autobiographical elements.
Perhaps where it breaks away from convention is only in its structure. It’s divided into three parts titled, “Daughter,” “Mother,” and “Reunion.” The first section covers 133 of the 178 pages of this slim volume and is told in first-person point of view. The second section offers the mother’s perspective in third-person. The third sort of epilogue part has a slightly more omniscient narrator.
The novel does very interesting things with shifting points of view, but the first-person “Daughter” section shows plainly the coming-of-age story that develops here. However, the narrative is, in many powerfully touching ways, a coming-of-age for the mother, too, who must now make a homelife in Natal that her daughter may never return to.
In one part of the novel, the daughter retrieves a peach-colored wingback chair a dorm mate left behind. She loves the color of it, its heft, what it represents as part of a future home. Back in Brazil, the mother is finding she has too much furniture in her apartment—with no one but herself to sit in it. She removes an armchair she will give away and then she “swept the floor and stood in the empty spot.”
As we move through the novel, we see that the daughter continues to encounter opportunities that lead to her independence, new ideas about how—and where—to live, even after college.
Her mother has found a new job back home, but the worrisome health issues her daughter has always known and fretted about, are exacerbated.
There is much to love about this novel. The aching loss of leaving home for the first time is resonant even for someone who might not have traveled internationally to study abroad.
The daughter uses a highlighter pencil that she brought to Vermont from Brazil and saves the nubbin and shavings of the worn-down instrument in a plastic bag. The weather in Vermont is a universe away from the warmer climes of Brazil. Her hard work is not easy—but it pays off for her as she begins to succeed in her classes, dreams bigger dreams, and imagines a future as a scholar and writer.
There is a kind of yearning on every page—for beauty and comfort, for the idealism of youth or simpler days, when dreams were vivid and light. But it is a longing made more fervid for the daughter by her desire to share her new experiences with her mother, even if at first, she doesn’t understand why her little girl would want to leave everything she has ever known.
The experience, we see, is an education for the mother, too.
The color blue is a motif that runs through the novel—the light of the laptops, vases, lamps, blouses, coffee mugs, cloudless skies, moon-shadowed snowy evenings, and bright sandy beaches. It is a soothing tone that colors the daughter’s promise and potential and how she can share all this at last with her mother in both their worlds.
I sometimes think that my life as a young, shy, homesick college student in the late 1980s could have been helped along by something like the internet. In those days, long distance calls home from landlines or pay phones were expensive and quite rare. Today, as a college professor, I still marvel at the ways cellphones and computers allow my students to be in constant touch with their folks back home. But perhaps they are not any more connected than I was 40 years ago. That is, the constant connection afforded by digital technology does not necessarily shore up the chasm of time and distance.
However, in the case of Blue Light Hours, it can create a gorgeous and tender story about how we try to manage our freedom, to find ourselves in a life we have built elsewhere, while still sometimes clinging to each other as we always did before, “arms touching, heads resting on each other’s shoulders.”
