The Love of Singular Men

Starred review from October 30, 2023
This outstanding posthumous English-language debut from Heringer (1988–2018) revolves around a Brazilian boy’s life-changing summer. Told in short, punchy sections, the narrative leaps back and forth between two time periods. In the first, set during Brazil’s military dictatorship, it’s 1976 and 13-year-old Camilo meets Cosme, a boy who’s new to Queím, their suburb on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Camilo is just beginning his journey of sexual self-discovery and finds himself magnetically drawn to Cosme, but their time together is abruptly and shockingly severed. In the second timeline, set three decades later, Camilo returns home (“I want to die right where I was born. Everyone likes a little symmetry”), wracked by obsessive, painful thoughts of Cosme, and crosses paths with a boy named Renato, who has a connection to Cosme. Heringer writes beautifully about the relationship between Camilo and Cosme (“My Cosme disappeared and I stayed, like an amputated octopus tentacle, which stays alive even after it’s cut off”), and never lets the heavy subject matter weigh things down too much. It’s a hypnotic and playful depiction of love’s seismic forces.