Saudades is a tale of shards in which the daily spoils of history, so to speak, are forever absent: exile, banishment, disappearance, wreckage, death. A choral novel of alternating voices that tries to say what cannot be said, catching stories that will remain foreign, officiating over a sorrow that is and is not our own in a murmur of absences where the erotic body offers fleeting refuge while literary references (yet another body, yet another voice) provide stings that accentuate the absence, yet keep the flame alive. –Silvia Molloy