A Literary Playlist

Állex Leilla's groundbreaking novel Springtime in the Bones is replete with musical (as well as literary, filmic, and pop-culture) references. Apart from the monumental challenge posed to me as the translator, this density of allusions created a rich world for the reader to step into and inhabit. Before learning anything else about her, we are provided the protagonist Luísa's CV, in which her reading and listening habits are just as important as her professional background: She's an "avid reader of Julio Cortázar, André

Gide, Thomas Mann, Cecília Meireles, fan of Lou Reed, Morrissey, Chrissie Hynde, U2 and R.E.M." (6) Later we glimpse a guilty pleasure in Luísa's admiration for Roberto Carlos, her bewilderment at her "great love" Michel's taste in jazz. All of these details serve to draw the fine contours of the characters and their personalities, their personal histories. Luísa's coping mechanism - or depending on her mood, her curse - is her ability to make associations - read: dissociate - with fragments of song lyrics; in this sense, the musical references also tell us something key about the protagonist's mental state in a novel that is largely an interior thriller.

But, perhaps more importantly, these allusions situate the book's characters in a place and time. They compose the ballad of Luísa and Michel's generation, which came of age during the late 80s, early 90s, as Brazil was emerging from its military dictatorship and gripped by the AIDS crisis. As in the work of Caio Fernando Abreu, the generation's most recognizable voice and the writer Leilla names as her greatest creative influence, Springtime in the Bones does not reference these events directly, but their reverberations are felt in the book's looming pessimism and gritty urban isolation. The soundtrack of this novel is its landscape, imbuing the text with its characteristic noirish atmosphere.

To help immerse the reader in this literary soundscape, I've created a Springtime in the Bones playlist. As Luísa announces while driving wildly through an abandoned Salvador: "My head is all disharmonised song fragments, the more my foot accelerates, the more the lines come..." (129). Enjoy listening responsibly, with foot off the gas.