Shelf Unbound October/November 2013 October 2013 | Page 17

from a Roman Catholic family, he: a
Protestant; Maria is metaphorically
the heart, the lover is the head (in fact,
he has a concaved chest as if no heart
can lie beneath his ribs); they are both
haunted by parental abuses—she by
her father’s, he by his mother’s. The
polarities continue as she says “yes” to
everything, while he says the decisive
“no.”
It is a relationship ill-fated from
the outset as Maria intuitively knows,
yet she continues to believe that they
were brought together because she
“called” to him, as her grandmother
had “called” for her husband, Maria’s
grandfather. There is a mysticism
that runs through this novel. Ghosts,
daemons, and old-world gods inhabit
Maria’s mind—holdovers from her
heritage, perhaps. But they’re not to
be dismissed. They give her depth
and soulfulness, whereas her lover
denies his deeper passions and seeks
“only … playful and happy girl[s] to
sleep with and to love.”
The interplay of gods and spirits
relates to the overall time structures
of the novel, too. From the first sentence there is a sense that for the
next 119 pages the reader will hear
a tale that has been told before, that

is perhaps both ancient and modern:
“So that, yes, here are the two lovers,
again…” (my itals.) Marcom steeps
herself in an heirloom narrative—
unrequited love—and time is elusive
and recursive in A Brief History of Yes.
In the timeline of the novel, the earliest chapter is just a few months before
the lovers meet, and the latest one
is three months after the break-up.
With each chapter we shift forward
and backward, shuffling vortex-wise
around the night of the break-up.
Music appears elsewhere in the
novel and entwines itself with language. Marcom has called her novel
a “literary fado” comparing the novel
to a style of Portuguese music that is
mournful, characterized by sentiments
of resignation and melancholy. “Song
is always a nostalgic form, the past
is always its guide—the longing for
home,” she writes. By the end of the
novel, Maria is a woman in exile—her
ex-husband and son celebrate Thanksgiving without her, her lover doesn’t
want to see her, she is hundreds of
miles away from her mother, even further from her native home of Portugal.
Amália Rodrigues’ “Fado Portugues”
plays on the radio. It is around this
time the word saudade emerges: