Empty wardrobes

Review by Booklist Review

After her husband's death, Dora Rosário immersed herself in widowhood. Drab clothes, a menial job in an antique furniture shop, and stilted conversations with her few remaining friends and relatives uses up the little energy she has left in her still relatively young 36-year-old self. Her teenage daughter, Lisa, is a spark of brightness, though her self-assuredness and naive optimism can be grating. When a furniture-shop customer seems to be interested in more than just Dora's opinions on antique rugs, a flicker of hope rises within her. Even without her beloved husband, maybe Dora can still create a life she loved. And then a single car ride changes everything for Dora, Lisa, and the mysterious customer. Acclaimed Portuguese author de Carvalho's first work available in English follows Dora's journey through grief, discovery, and acceptance of a new life. Gracefully translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Dora's story is illuminating, inspiring, and heartbreaking in equal measures. Fans of Anne Tyler, Marian Keyes, and Christine Féret-Fleury will find themselves absorbed in the novella's sparse but evocative prose.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Portuguese writer de Carvalho's sharp 1966 novel follows three women through an oppressive Catholic society. Dora Rosário, a widow in her late 30s, still mourns her husband, Duarte, who died a decade earlier. She confides to the narrator, Manuela, an old friend of Duarte's, about her grief, leaving Manuela to convey Dora's story secondhand--with her own occasional fabrications sprinkled in. Dora has kept to herself, raising her daughter, Lisa, now 17, and dealing with the interference of Duarte's mother, Ana. Duarte left them no money, so Dora took a job at an antique store where she's worked for many years. One day Ana reveals a terrible secret, changing Dora's vision of her husband as a "Christ" and releasing her from her grief. Manuela's lover Ernesto then comes to the antique store to buy a rug, but instead becomes interested in Dora. They go for a car ride, ending in a wreck that leaves Dora's face permanently scarred. The story concludes with a startling outcome that serves as a critique of a society that only values women for their youth and beauty. It's a bit didactic, but de Carvalho (1921--1998) complicates things with Manuela's unreliable narration and internalized misogyny. This unearthed story leaves readers with much to chew on. (Oct.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A widow restarts her life after a decade of mourning in this 1966 novel, the first by this towering Portuguese novelist to be translated into English. Dora Rosário is the manager of a finely appointed antiques shop nicknamed The Museum, the mother of teenage Lisa, and an independent woman living in Lisbon in the prime of her life. Yet, ever since the death of her husband, Duarte, 10 years earlier, Dora has devoted her days to tending and preserving his memory. In life, Duarte was an insufficient spouse--a self-appointed Christ figure with "vast reserves of passive resistance," which he used to rebuff all his mother's proclamations that "her son would one day cause a stir." When Duarte died, he left Dora and the young Lisa destitute and forced to rely on his indomitably eccentric mother, Senhora Dona Ana, for material support until Dora became the manager of the antiques store, the first job she had ever held. For a decade this is how the women's lives progress. Lisa grows up to become a graceful, witty, and entirely insouciant teenager, Dona Ana has begun to slip into senility, and Dora lives as "a career widow," following a ritualistic routine among the dusty remains of other people's memories. Then, on the night of Lisa's 17th birthday party, Dona Ana reveals a devastating truth about her son that calls into question all of Dora's devotion. What follows fundamentally changes the lives of all three generations of Rosário women, but particularly Dora, who must now look clearly for the first time at the legacy her husband has really left her: a desiccated life lived at the behest of a society that views her value only in accordance to her relation to men. A still, luminous book whose precise characters evoke broad truths about the human experience. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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It was a spring day which, apparently at least, began and ended like any other spring day: that is what she would have said or, more likely, thought, because she was always a woman of few words. She never said more than was strictly necessary - the bare indispensable minimum - or else she would begin to say only what was necessary, then quickly grow tired, or stop mid-stream, as though she suddenly realized that it wasn't worth going on and was a waste of effort. She would sit quite still then, her face a blank, like someone poised on the edge of an ellipsis, or standing hesitantly at the sea's edge in winter, and at such moments, all the light would go out of her eyes, as if absorbed by a piece of blotting paper; for all I know, she may still be like that, because I never saw her again. For a long time, I failed to understand that these lapses into unconsciousness, which is what they were, invariably led her back to the same place, or, rather, to the same person, to the same tarnished image of that person, because, as I said, she was not a woman given to confessions. Words were of no use to her to explain her thoughts, to polish or disguise them, which is what most of us do. She would use them, and then only as a last resort, to say something urgent (I'm referring, of course, to the time before the party her daughter Lisa gave for her friends. After that, it would be another story). And when she absolutely had to speak, she would fall silent immediately afterwards (or, as I said earlier, stop halfway), and it wasn't only the light in her eyes that was switched off then, for her body, too, would droop slightly, as if someone had turned off the current - which, however low-voltage, at least kept it active - as if her body had forgotten its original upright posture. When this happened, she wasn't really there, although no one knew where she was or who she was with. In fact, such a thought probably wouldn't occur to anyone, because her face betrayed none of this, only her eyes and her hands, but who would notice either her eyes or indeed her hands, which lay half-open on her lap, like shells washed up on the beach? Sometimes when I was with her, I thought that perhaps what she needed was a good shake or, better still, an x-ray, so that we could see if she did actually have more inside her than just lungs and a digestive system. Excerpted from Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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