‘The Tokyo Suite is the English-Language debut
of one of Brazil’s most exciting authors’
– Europa Editions
[ About The Tokyo Suite ]
A good nanny is hard to find. Fernanda, a busy executive whose marriage is foundering, has a room in her sprawling house redecorated in the style of a tiny luxury hotel room, the Tokyo Suite, to entice her maid Maju to stay.
Still, one morning, Maju walks out the door, slips past the army of nannies in the square, gets into a taxi, and vanishes. She also takes Fernanda’s daughter Cora with her.
Consumed by her own personal and professional crises Fernanda doesn’t realize at first that Cora is missing, and that Maju has kidnapped her, but when she does, she is violently pulled back into reality and the vagaries of her domestic life.
Meanwhile, Maju with Cora in tow, stops in cheap motels and abandoned locales as she makes her way across the Brazilian countryside, carrying out her plan, which will quickly and brutally veer out of control.
Madalosso sets in motion the lives of characters endlessly searching for something—affection, redemption, sex—to free them. Cora’s disappearance puts the past and the present on a collision course, and ignites desires, resentments, and class tensions. The desperate quest that ensues is a settling of scores with life and the expectations we create for ourselves.
[ My Review ]
The Tokyo Suite by Giovana Madalosso published February 27th with Europa Editions UK and is translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato. It is described as ‘a powerful domestic thriller’ one that ‘masterfully captures the essence of modern urban living, and shows how far people will go to reclaim a sense of control over their own lives.’
Set in Brazil, The Tokyo Suite centres around the lives of one particular family and their maid. Fernanda on paper has it all, a willing husband, an exciting job in the media and a gorgeous little girl. She is the main bread winner, with her husband, Cacá, very much a free spirit with an entrepreneurial nature. Maja, their maid, takes care of the needs of their daughter, Cora, but Maja has issues outside her job that threaten to spill over into her working life.
As Fernanda entrusts Maja with much of the day-to-to activities that Cora is involved in, she steps back from Cora’s routine, slowly involving herself in other affairs that start to pull on her time. As Fernanda explores other options on how to live her life, she pays little heed to Cora, Cacá or Maja. She decorates a space for Maja to stay, nicknaming it The Tokyo Suite, and sets quite strict rules but, as time passes, Maja gets frustrated with how her life has transpired and she decides to make a drastic change.
Maja packs a bag for herself and Cora and slowly disappears into the crowds of busy city living. Using public transport, she assumes a new identity for herself and Cora, with the intention of removing Cora from the cold family environment that she inhabits. Maja decides that she can show Cora a much better lifestyle and travels through the Brazilian countryside on her quest to fulfil this ambition. But her plans soon become undone when more than one obstacle falls in their path.
The Tokyo Suite is very much a human story, and a story of motherhood, as Giovana Madalosso delves deep into what it means to never be content with what one has, or could have, and to always be striving for more. The characters are all frustrated with life, except for Cora who is just a little girl who wants to be loved. We are all guilty of imagining different lives for ourselves, with that rose-tinted view of the grass being greener on the other side. But to be human is to have imperfections and, for many, to always have dreams and expectations that sometimes are just unattainable. Life is complex. Living is complex. In The Tokyo Suite Giovana Madalosso explores what happens when we strive to reach too far and the consequences of our actions.
A contemplative novel, The Tokyo Suite examines the flawed aspects of being human and all that it entails. It is also an exploration of motherhood in all its various guises, highlighting the idealized image of being in that role and recognising the challenges, doubts, internal conflict and contradictions inherent in this experience. The Tokyo Suite is quite a quirky tale and I’m delighted to have been introduced, for the first time, to the work of a Brazilian author!
* Thanks to Europa Editions UK for a review copy of The Tokyo Suite in exchange for my honest review
[ Author & Translator Bio ]
Giovana Madalosso is an award-winning Brazilian writer and journalist. The Tokyo Suite is the first of her novels to be published in English.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. She was awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Translation for The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel. Originally from Natal, Brazil, Dantas Lobato lives in Iowa and teaches at Grinnell College. Blue Light Hours is her debut novel.
This sounds like a really interesting book, with an international theme. I like being exposed to South American writers, especially as there is often a limited supply of their translated work.