Photograph by Renato Parada

Your story in this week’s issue, “Sevastopol,” is set, despite its title, in the underground theatre world of São Paulo. Is that a milieu you know well?

I’m no stranger to the places where Klaus, one of the two main characters, hangs out in São Paulo—the theatres downtown, the old trattorias in Little Italy, the area around Praça da República. But I didn’t want the fact that I’m familiar with a certain world to matter, to change the way I’d write about it. I’ve never been to Sevastopol, for example, or anywhere else in Ukraine or Russia. When you’re writing fiction, knowing a lot about something can be a problem if you end up being limited by that knowledge. It can be just as bad as knowing nothing. “Sevastopol” was published in Brazil as part of a collection of three stories; in the book, I was less interested in the reality of objects than in their representation. The city of Sevastopol appears here first as a picture on a postcard, then as a city on a map. And, although I like the theatre and have actor friends, the experience I was trying to present was less my own than that of a São Paulo that could be depicted in a horror movie, with green neon lights, seedy venues, and this character, Klaus, a sort of vampire, who wears “clothing from centuries past, as if he had been asleep for years and then suddenly awoke.” All slightly unreal and, therefore, more real.

How did you come up with this odd pairing of characters: a washed-up, aging avant-garde director-playwright and a directionless young woman who maybe wants to be a writer?

Nadia is the youngest character in the book. She’s helping that washed-up old theatre director write his play while trying to write her own story and, ultimately, deal with her life. What strikes me about them is that they’re both obsessed with stories. Klaus chases after the story of a Russian painter who lived during the Crimean War. Nadia is writing something about the comings and goings of a man and a woman. These two stories say a lot about Klaus and Nadia, about their lives. And it’s up to us, as readers, to set off in search of that meaning—though, of course, nothing gets resolved, and only new and bigger problems arise. There’s another thing that interested me while I was writing: two of the three stories in my book, including this one, are narrated by women. In both cases, the narrators are closely engaged with male characters, and particularly with the way that those male characters see them. I wanted to make the tension between the narrators and these men a subject of the stories, as well.

What draws Klaus and Nadia to each other?

There’s a kind of anguish and urgency in them both. They lead unsatisfactory lives. Without planning to, they grow close. They seem to have very little to lose. And they both feel a certain tragic hope. Nadia is a university student from the countryside who lives alone in São Paulo. Brazil doesn’t offer a lot of prospects for her generation—though she doesn’t know that yet. Klaus, who has been semi-successful in the São Paulo avant-garde theatre scene, is embarking on what appears to be his last shot. They’re two people guided by something we can’t quite put our finger on, some sort of will, desire, fantasy. But also guided by nothing. And it has to do with the very idea of fiction, as well: in the face of frustration, of defeat, when the world falls short of the ideal we’ve formed of it, we start making things up.

As you say, the characters in your story are also telling their own stories: that of a Russian painter, Bogdan Trunov, who never painted the dramatic scenes of the war-torn world he inhabited, and the ethereal unsolved mystery of Nadia and Sasha. What made you want to bring these three disparate story lines together?

The book is composed of three stories. And there are three versions of Nadia’s story. And there is the intersection between Klaus and Nadia and the stories they are writing. That is how the whole book is structured. I’d like it to work like the images in a poem: the relationships between the images aren’t guided by a causal link, as they would be in prose, but, rather, they accumulate and contaminate each other, contiguously. On one of the first pages of the book, a character says that events are like bandages that we have to ravel and unravel as carefully as possible. I’d like that to apply, for example, to the three versions of the story of love and loss that Nadia is writing. And I’d like there to be, within those three attempts, a story that ravels and unravels and is a piece of Nadia’s heart, something vital to her. Just as Klaus’s heart and his secrets may be deeply connected to his obsession with the canvases of the Russian painter who never portrays battlefields or soldiers in action.

It seems to me that Nadia’s story gets better in the course of your story—that is, she learns something about how to write. Does she learn from Klaus’s mistakes?

I think Nadia undergoes a transformation over the course of the story. It’s not just her writing that changes but the way she lives. Something happens inside her. Or perhaps she is simply carried along by the circumstances. But it’s important to me that the nature of that transformation (be it what it may) is never explained, that it’s not in the story. So that that thought sticks with the reader, who may then ask, for example, whether Nadia learned anything from Klaus, and, if so, what?

On the other hand, the play sounds excruciating to sit through. Is Trunov based on a real painter?

He was inspired by an eighteenth-century French painter, Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721). Watteau painted mostly the prosaic aspects of war, the quiet moments between battles. Another recurring theme in his paintings is the world of theatre: melancholy actors and backstage scenes, in a dreamlike atmosphere of illusion and fantasy. Things that are very much at play for Nadia and Klaus, too.

It seems unlikely that Klaus will have much of a future beyond this play. What do you envision for Nadia?

The last sentence of the story sort of sums up my feeling: the image of a really wide avenue that, at first glance, seems impossible to cross.

Your story collection was published in Brazil in 2018, and is now slated to be published in the U.S., by New Directions, in 2021. Does this story link to the others in the book?

The book has three distinct stories, but it also flirts with the cohesiveness of a novel. The stories are titled by months of the year, “August” (published here as “Sevastopol”), “December,” and “May,” and they allude to Tolstoy’s “Sevastopol Sketches,” of which there are also three: “Sevastopol in December,” “Sevastopol in May,” and “Sevastopol in August.” Each of the stories has two main characters. And, while the book has absolutely nothing to do with any historical work (it’s not about war, not even close), an air of conflict and defeat runs throughout—which also has to do with Brazil today, and the appalling election of the Bolsonaro government. Above all, I wanted to write stories that worked independently, each in its own world, but, at the same time, could be connected by subtle links, a shared syntax and pacing. As if beyond the voice narrating each of the stories there were something subjective, something blurry, hovering over it all, creating an effect. So there’s a feeling of difference among the stories but also of closeness (recurring themes, a common tone, a progression that is also indicated by the months in the stories’ titles). I wanted the reader to reach the end and be able to go back through, looking for points of contact. For example, there’s always someone telling, imagining, remembering a story. And the story that’s told, imagined, invented becomes a kind of commentary on the main story—and on the book as well. These are simple stories that gradually become complex.

Are there any short-story writers you think of as particularly influential for you? Do you have any favorite fiction pieces about the theatre?

For this book, Chekhov, Babel, Tolstoy, Flannery O’Connor. Kafka, Bolaño, Zambra. Machado, Bernardo Carvalho, Sérgio Sant’Anna. Hemingway, Cheever, Sebald. George Saunders. And the novels of Rachel Cusk, J. M. Coetzee, Ben Lerner, Valeria Luiselli. I like a 1941 story by the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti, “Un sueño realizado.” It’s the story of an old, broke theatre actor who recalls an episode from many years before when, down on his luck, he agreed to earn some money by creating a scene based on the enigmatic dream of an extravagant and mysterious woman.