Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de
Lisboa
Almost Gone: Essay
English B2.2
Catarina Rodrigues, n 46567
These linked stories, about three generations of a Portuguese-American family, all in
search for better lives, digs you into the book and also disorients you. If I plotted out the
stories on a timeline, they would start with Nuno and Helena in Portugal, then would go
to the two of them and the next generation, their son Paulo and his wife Claire in coastal
Rhode Island, and finally all of them and Paulo and Claire's son Scott, with wife Hailey
and daughter Emily, also in Rhode Island. But the stories are not set in chronological
order; they begin and end with Scott, who has reached a point in his adult life where
he's trying to get lost through travel or through drinking after an enormous trauma.
These stories all submerge in sadness. It's like the family legacy, and as you read and
find your way along the through-line of the narrative, one death seems to echo another,
as one hoped-for but failed connection seems to echo another. Nuno and his adult son,
Paulo, both desire an important secondary character, the beautiful Catarina, and both in
their own way fail with her.
And yet the narrative, which is filled with losses, is not unrelievedly grim. The
lightness doesn't necessarily come from any great happiness, but from the writing itself.
Sousa's description of the cities, neighborhoods, and beaches where characters follow
their drives and desperately conceived plans is sharply drawn and makes the places
themselves seem alive. The characters rarely get what they want, but their wants are
deeply felt, and that's due to Sousa's skill.
They have left places and people behind, and it's not certain that they will find new
places or people to settle on. These characters may try to run away from their problems,
their losses, but they cant hide from their literary fate. Everytime they think they will
move on with their lifes, something happens, leading to another tragic situation. In my
opinion, theyre all trying to get more and more lost in an attempt to forget the tragic
situations that happened to them.
These are stories of loss, infidelity, alienation, and all the demons of modern suburban
life. Its remarkable how well the Portuguese-American experience assimilates into the
suburban-American experience. Three generations that seem so different but all of them
have the same demons, where every parent feels alienated from their child, every
marriage struggles to survive.
If you put this collection down and come back to it, its easy to forget how all of the
stories intersect, but one should resist the urge to flip back and forth, trying to tie
everything together. Thats because it all does come together in the end, beautifully, and
part of the pleasure of reading Almost Gone is the flash of recognition one feels
throughout. You feel entirely immersed in a bullfight in Spain, which seems to have
nothing to do with the rest of the book, only to come to realize how this event leads to
others. In the final story, we return to the beach with Scott, to the main event that has
led him to flee his wife and his life back in the U.S. The story is painful in its distillation
of emotion, and, like the best of these stories, hovers between suggestion and straight
narrative, leaving the reader with a feeling of uncertainty.
This is a collection of lives gone wrong, sometimes miserable by the reader
perspective of deadly mistakes and the contradictory desires to preserve and to erase it.
Almost Gone is full of constructed parallels. No scene is without a direct line back to
the theme. Sousa drops each chapter neatly in its place. Even banal interactions are
filled with a deep meaning.
Whats wrong with you? [Nuno] asked. Whatd you do?
Helena told him about the black dog in the garden.
Ive never seen him, he said, peering out the window.
[]
Nuno picked up one of the pancakes, stared closely at it, and then threw it back on his
plate.
What happened to these? They look different.
Helena hadnt done anything different with the pancakes. She didnt know what he was
talking about. But she made him some more, because she didnt want to get into
anything.
Finally Nuno pushed his plate away and ran a hand over his mouth. Ill take Paulo to
school on my way to work, since you woke me up so early, banging on the damn
window
Im sorry, she said. but it was the dog, not me. (p. 105)
When I started reading the first pages of the book I could never imagine how amazing
and heartbreaking it would be for me. It turned out to be one of my favorite books when
I thought it would be boring.
I couldnt be more wrong. In this linked stories, Sousas teach us that running from a
problem will only create more, that we cant run from our fate. A kind of tale about
survival that dont find easy answers.
The story of each character seems so real that the reader, in some way, follows the
protagonists in this adventure, sharing all the emotions with them. This book is so
intense and so real, that can lead the reader to tears, anger, happiness and all of this
feelings mixed.
This book was amazing. From the moment you pick it up it grabs your full attention.
My only problem with it was that I had an incredibly hard time putting it down. More
than once I found myself staying up far later than I should trying to read one more
chapter.
Finally, Brian Sousa wrote this book with common language. It is easy to understand,
he doesnt uses very complicated words, probably in order that the book reaches
everyone.
The fact that Sousas often used dialogues in this book make it easier to read for those
who dont like heavy reading. Sousas also describes the places where the characters
are, what, most of the times, takes the reader in a journey without even being really
there. It creates a desire in the reader to visit this cities, to know this places.
