The difficult details of what happened in our parents' lives before we were born often remain secret. This short, startlingly impactful novel is composed in the form of a letter which Júlia writes to her twin children. She confides in them about a violent incident which occurred long before they were conceived during which she was raped. In 2014, Júlia went on a run in the forest of Rio de Janeiro before a planned meeting about her architectural project of constructing an Olympic village in the city. She was sexually violated and physically attacked at gunpoint. The perpetrator was never found. Though she is aware that “now when people look at me they no longer see the body of a woman destroyed”, the damage is always emotionally present even if it is no longer physically visible. “That was my despair. The world went on, and my body, too, my work, my relationship, the things I wasn't sure about, my issues. My life was still there, even though it was over.” In describing her experience of surviving the attack, the police case which followed and the excruciating difficulty of life afterward we gain a complex and vivid portrait of the damage which persists after such a horrific assault.
The author notes at the end of the book that it was created through long conversations and a collaborative effort with her friend who was raped. They could have written a nonfiction account of her experience but it's fitting that it was transformed into a fictional narrative to more adequately represent the psychological reality of the victim. The style of the novel cleverly represents Júlia's state of mind to give a visceral understanding of her experience. Memories are both clearly present and jumbled. She's asked to describe what her attacker looked like for a police sketch and identify suspects from line ups, but it's moving how she conveys the agonizing difficulty of recognizing her attacker when “Looking in the mirror... I don't even recognise myself.” Sometimes sentences in the novel extend at a rapid pace showing the confusion of thoughts, emotion and her sense of time. Sections move back and forth between details of the attack and her life afterward. Though clarity becomes ever more elusive, while with her therapist she desperately thinks “If I talked about nothing else, if I only repeated the same story every day I came here, putting all of my versions together, maybe I'd get there. At some point, I'd get it all out and free myself of this past.” Sadly, there can be no escape from what happened to her but this account does a great deal to instil understanding.
Tatiana Salem Levy has an artful way of presenting individual experience framed by issues to do with nationality as in her previous novel “The House in Smyrna”. In this new book she shows the disconnect between the protagonist's life after her assault and the authorities' agenda. Police are more focused on closing the case than finding the right suspect. At one point the female investigator suggests that Júlia was partly at fault for jogging in an unpopulated area at a certain time of day. There's a buoyant attitude in the country surrounding the World Cup and Olympics while issues of public safety are being swept under the rug. Factors such as this shows why some victims of rape choose to not report or pursue justice because the continuing emotional trauma and further damage is too difficult. It reminded me of the clearsighted way Kandasamy's “When I Hit You” shows why reporting domestic abuse often results in further punishment for the victim. Levy's novel is full of bravery and insight in how it conveys the painful reality of sexual assault.
