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 what the Portuguese call saudade--meaning, loosely, yearning and nostalgia for something or someone irrepreably 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 captures the workings of attraction and grief, proving once again that American letters has no better poet of love and loss than Micheline Aharonian Marcom.