In his first novel, memoirist Sledge (Mother and Son
) imagines the life of poet Elizabeth Bishop and her lover, socialite and architect Lota de Macedo Soares, while they lived together in Brazil during the 1950s and '60s. Both women struggle with their demons as, from a remote mountain compound in Samambaia (where Lota has designed and built a glass house), Elizabeth wins the Pulitzer Prize and Lota rises to power in the turbulent political sphere of Rio de Janeiro. The book imagines much of the couple's tumultuous, tragically short relationship, based partially on Elizabeth's surviving letters, journals, and drafts (though her correspondence with Lota was burned by Lota's ex-lover). Sledge gives contour to their lives while artfully evoking Brazil's “primeval” rural landscape and uniquely urbane Rio (“half jungle” and “half twentieth-century megalopolis”), and peppers his narrative with appearances by notable contemporaries like Robert Lowell and Frank O'Hara. This is not the first fictionalized history of the couple during this period (when Bishop wrote Questions of Travel
and “The Scream”), but Sledge delivers a sensitive and engrossing variation. (June)
