Feast Days
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Intelligent and deeply felt, Feast Days follows a young wife who relocates with her financier husband to São Paulo -- a South American megacity that impresses and unsettles, conceals and erupts. Here in her new home, she reckons with the twenty-first century as she encounters crime, protests, refugees gentrification, and the collision of art and commerce, while confronting the crisis slowly building inside her own marriage.
In stylish prose and with piercing wit, Ian MacKenzie tells the story of Emma, a young woman who has moved from New York to Brazil just as massive demonstrations against the government are breaking out across the country amid growing economic inequality. Emma has come to Brazil for her husband's career, with no job prospects of her own, a weak grasp of the language, and a deep ambivalence about having a child. Her early days in Sao Paulo are listless but privileged; she dines at high-end restaurants, tutors wealthy Brazilians in English, and observes the city she now calls home.
But when Emma volunteers at a local church to assist refugees and grows more deeply connected to the people she meets in the course of her days, she finds herself unable to resist the tug of Sao Paulo's political and social unrest.
As the country moves seemingly closer to a breaking point, so does Emma's marriage, as she and her husband can no longer ignore the silent, tectonic shifts beneath the surface of their relationship.
Feast Days is a sharply observed story of expatriate life, as well as a meditation on the hidden costs of modern living and how easily our belief systems can collapse around us.
"Devastating, funny and wise, it's among the best novels I know about the fate of American innocence abroad."-Garth Greenwell
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
No one could accuse the heroine of MacKenzie's second novel (after City of Strangers) of leading an unexamined life, and the wit with which she conducts that examination elevates this brilliant work. Emma her name evokes Flaubert's restless housewife is a "trailing spouse" accompanying her investment banker husband to S o Paulo, "a city that reminded you of what Americans used to think the future would look like gleaming and decrepit at once." Possessing a degree in cultural anthropology and dead languages, she interrogates her position in this unfamiliar, stratified society: "There were aspects of the world that, because of my husband, I had the luxury of not paying attention to." Emma gives English lessons, lunches with affluent wives, flirts with adultery, and muses on time as a "confusion of folds," seeing Brazil, her marriage, and language as palimpsests bearing signs of the past, the present, and the future. Her observations are satirical, incisive, and often melancholy. As street protests calling for political change intensify, so too do Emma's anxiousness and aimless desires, beset as she is by an "affliction of vagueness." There is no cataclysm but rather a pervasive sense of unrest, both large and small scale, social and personal, conveyed in MacKenzie's unruffled, discerning prose. With it, MacKenzie has captured one of the most memorable narrative voices in recent fiction.