A NATUREZA DA MORDIDA

"What is it that you no longer have that makes you so sad?"
This is the question Biá—a retired psychoanalyst and literature lover—asks the young journalist Olívia the first time they meet, finding her seated at a table in an improvised used bookstore. This unexpected provocation, coming from a stranger capable of listening “as if embracing,” triggers a series of encounters marked by growing intimacy, gradually revealing the stories of both women.
“Our friendship began like this, while we were drowning,” says Olívia.
Alternating between the two voices, the narrative strength of Olívia—objective, descriptive, and linear—contrasts with Biá’s scattered notes, whose fragmented and unreliable memories lead to a turning point in the story. The reader is then shown events that shaped each of them, highlighting the parallels between the different kinds of abandonment they have suffered (and inflicted). By getting to know Olívia, the reader becomes prepared to understand Biá—and, ultimately, to reflect on the question: what would we have done in her place?
As in the author’s previous novels, the characters seem to leap off the page, confronting the reader with universal questions: the unconditional nature of love, the strength of desire, guilt and forgetting, memory and its elusive connection with forgiveness.
This is also a book about friendship.
With a unique, powerful, and immersive narrative, Carla Madeira reaffirms her place with A natureza da mordida as one of the most important voices in contemporary Brazilian literature.