After Life

<div>Bruna Veríssimo a youth from the hardscrabble streets of Recife in Northeast Brazil spoke with Tobias Hecht over the course of many years reliving her early childhood in a raging and destitute home her initiation into the world of prostitution at a time when her contemporaries had scarcely started school and her coming of age against all odds.<p>Hecht had originally intended to write a biography of Veríssimo. But with interviews ultimately spanning a decade he couldn't ignore that much of what he had been told wasn't strictly speaking true. In Veríssimo's recounting of her life a sister who had never been born died tragically while the very same rape that shattered the body and mind of an acquaintance occurred a second time only with a different victim and several years later. At night with the anthropologist's tape recorder in hand she became her own ethnographer inventing informants interviewing herself and answering in distinct voices.</p><p>With truth impossible to disentangle from invention Hecht followed the lead of Veríssimo his would-be informant creating characters rendering a tale that didn't happen but that might have probing at what it means to translate a life into words.</p><p>A call and response of truth and invention mental illness and yearning <i>After Life</i> is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the Latin American <i>testimonio</i> genre. Desire melancholy longing regret and the hunger to live beyond the confines of past and future meet in this debut novel by Tobias Hecht.</p></div>