A Brief History of Yes
A collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form perfectly captures the workings of attraction and grief.
Micheline Marcom describes 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 saudade--meaning, loosely, yearning and nostalgia for something or someone irreparably 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 perfectly captures the workings of attraction and grief, proving once again that American literature has no better poet of love and loss than Micheline Aharonian Marcom.
“A beautiful elegy for lovers lost within bittersweet recollections.”
“Marcom allows wildness to arise with in language. Her writing is also attuned to the subtler risks of style—or rather, it radically recasts style as risk. To read Marcom, then, is to read writing that risks being the sole instance of its species—words that could only have been written the way they are written.”
–David Winters, Quarterly Conversation
“A Brief History of Yes is a weeping novel. Its cohesion is mourning. Ineluctable sorrow manifests in its structure and grammar, in its sounds and imagery...Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s abiding interpretation of language is reaching and relentless and unrestrained.”
–Numero Cinq
"The book is slender, yet dense with language of a high register. In Marcom’s novel, reality appears more blurred, mysteries more veiled, and the land of grief more convincingly enveloping because her characters are unabashedly archetypal in their presence—not individuals but types playing out timeless human dramas."
–Kenyon Review