Sevastopol

Sevastopol contains three distinct narratives, each burrowing inside a crucial turning-point in a person's life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a semi-abandoned inn in the middle of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sebastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers. Partly inspired by Tolstoy's The Sevastopol Sketches, but also reminiscent of the powerfully restrained prose of Chekhov, Roberto Bolano, and Rachel Cusk, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist--