A Brief History of Yes

Micheline Marcom describes her newest novel, A Brief History of Yes–her first since 2008’s scathing and erotic The Mirror in the Well–as a literary fado, referring to a style of Portuguese music that, akin to the American blues, is often melancholic and soulful, and encapsulates the feeling of saudade–meaning, loosely, yearning and nostalgia for something or someone irreparably lost. A Brief History of Yes tells the story of the break-up between a Portuguese woman named Maria and an unnamed American man: it is a collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form perfectly captures the workings of attraction and grief, proving once again that American literature has no better poet of love and loss than Micheline Aharonian Marcom.