Pandora

Equal parts ribald and unsettling, Brazilian writer Pacheco’s English-language debut chronicles a literature professor’s mental breakdown. Ana, 40, is confined to her São Paulo apartment while Covid-19 tears through the city. The disease has just killed her lover, Alice, with whom she’d been trying to launch a porn site featuring performers from their queer social network. As Ana reels in isolation, the short chapters take various forms, such as entries in a memory book prompted by her psychiatrist, White Beard, in which she recounts having a “normal” childhood until she was 12 and her life was changed by the “dark influence” of a solar eclipse. Elsewhere, Ana drafts a syllabus for an upcoming virtual seminar, with discussion topics that reflect her concerns (“Money, depression, burnout. The new time-space of contemporary fiction”), and remembers how her academic work dovetailed with the porn project, as when she added voiceover of a Kafka story to a scene of a performer “immersed in the penal code, naked on all fours.” Meanwhile, her present-day life unravels, as she begins a romantic and sexual relationship with a pangolin and later a megabat. The experimental and provocative narration is consistently engrossing, even as Ana grows increasingly unstable from White Beard’s shifting menu of medications to the point that she believes she’s turned into an eagle. It adds up to a singular portrait of pandemic life. (Nov.)