Twenty After Midnight

June 1, 2020
Brazilian writer Galera’s thoughtful, bittersweet novel (after Blood-Drenched Beard) tackles the ephemeral nature of friendship. Emiliano, 39, struggles to pay the rent on his São Paulo apartment and to finish his doctorate. He’s lost touch with a group of friends from college, with whom he launched Orangutan, a webzine. The shocking murder of their friend Andrei “Duke” Dukelsky triggers a melancholy reunion for Emiliano and surviving “Orangutanuns” Aurora and Antero. Catching up begins at the funeral and continues at a bar, where Emiliano, Aurora, and Antero realize Duke, who was well-known for his novels, has made a greater impact than any of them. Emiliano, now a freelance writer, is outraged when an editor suggests he write a quick biography of Duke, to “ride the coattails of his death.” Emiliano’s memories of Duke are painfully tied to Duke’s rejection of him, and Duke gained mileage in his literary career by making Emiliano a thinly disguised character in his fiction “at a time when sex between men was either invisible or merely hinted at in Brazilian literature and made the hippest of humanities students uncomfortable.” The infectious, rueful narration shows Emiliano’s uneasy attachment to his home city. Galera crafts a nuanced, complex portrait of millennial anxiety and anomie. Agent: Laurence Laluyaux, RCW Literary Agency.

August 1, 2020
A murder exacerbates apocalyptic angst among a group of Brazilian millennials. And though millennials are its focus, the fifth novel by Brazilian author Galera, and third in English translation, will feel temperamentally familiar to any devoted reader of smart but jaded Gen X writers like Bret Easton Ellis or Douglas Coupland. "These days were simply the gateway to a slow and irreversible catastrophe," says Aurora, one of the three narrators reckoning with the death of Andrei, a cult writer stabbed in Porto Alegre. In the late 1990s, Aurora, along with Emiliano and Antero, collaborated with Andrei on a popular online e-zine that made them budding cultural critics with seemingly bright futures. But two decades have taken a toll: Aurora is a biologist whose path to a Ph.D. has been waylaid by a malicious colleague; Emiliano's career as a journalist has fizzled along with the industry, and Antero's success as a marketer is undercut by his sense that his job cynically manipulates the masses. ("Dishonesty at its purest was the aesthetics of the future," he intones.) If they've all fallen short of their ambitions, is that a cultural problem or an individual one? Part of the appeal of the novel is that it leaves the question open: All three characters are bright, engaging, occasionally provocative (Antero shocks a TED Talk crowd with an extended riff on the Marquis de Sade), and legitimately questioning their places in the world. Facts won't save them: When Emiliano is solicited to write Andrei's biography, his catastrophic anxiety only intensifies. No question, the mood is persistently sour: Antero bemoans a future world "where resources were scarce and the few jobs still available involved designing and supervising the machines that would look after the rest of the world." But like a well-made song in a minor key, Galera darkens his narrative with an honesty that feels cleansing. A downhearted but strangely vibrant tale of a generation in crisis.

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