Bruna Dantas Lobato’s novel Blue Light Hours is a mesmerizing debut that mines the everyday lives of a mother and daughter, separated by 4,000 miles, to profound effect.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“This is a slim work with a narrow focus that belies the depth of its own emotion, the profundity of Dantas Lobato’s observations . . . There’s a quiet lyricism to Dantas Lobato’s prose, an elegance both to her sentences and to the shape of the book as a whole. It’s a work you could read in an afternoon or linger over for an entire winter, finding something new to savor on each page . . . In her first novel, she shows that her talent as a writer is at least as tremendous as her talent as a translator.”
In her own words, here is Bruna Dantas Lobato’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Blue Light Hours:
When I’m working at my desk, I’m usually sitting there in complete silence so I can listen to the sound of my own voice and hear the rhythm of the sentences. But so much of my writing happens when I’m not at my desk, when I’m out there watering the plants and listening to music, figuring out what it is I want to say when I get back to the page. Many songs followed me around while I worked on my debut novel, Blue Light Hours, about a Brazilian woman’s first year at a small college in Vermont and how she fosters a relationship with her mom back home over video calls.
These songs helped me think through the mood and atmosphere I wanted to capture, the time and place I wanted to evoke, and the memories I wanted to conjure up. My character listens to Billie Holiday when she’s feeling melancholic over winter break, Elis Regina when she misses her family back in Brazil, and Katy Perry when she’s at a campus party in the 2010s. But there are so many other songs secretly inflecting her ideas and feelings throughout the book. Here are seven of them:
“Last Train Home,” Pat Metheny Group
When I first started working on this book, as a new immigrant still trying to figure out how to be a person in this country, I used to listen to this instrumental piece on a loop. It’s both hopeful and wistful, with the bass pattern and the brushes on the snare drum mimicking the sound of a train running on its tracks, and the melody on the guitar eloquently talking to me. Something about the fact that I could always press play to board the last train home comforted me. The guitar melody also helped me think through the arc and cadence of sentences, and of my narrator’s long conversations with her mom on Skype—and it taught me how one might convey longing and urgency with sound, even when there are no words.
“Moonlight in Vermont,” Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
A sweet song set in an idyllic version of Vermont. I love how none of the lines rhyme or create much of a narrative, but that what threads them together is the repetition of “moonlight in Vermont” at the end of each section. The word “snowlight” also stands out to me, that blinding reflective glow of white snow I’ve rarely seen described. As my characters wished for more warmth and light in their own version of Vermont, I often thought about this song. And Fitzgerald’s velvety voice can make anything sound amazing.
“Manhã de Carnaval,” Elizeth Cardoso (from the Black Orpheus soundtrack)
This song captures the unique feeling of waking up the day after a big party, when the confetti no longer looks so festive and someone should probably get started on the cleaning. “After this happiest of days / I don’t know when another will come,” is how I might translate the central verse. I wrote the campus party scene mentioned above (the one where my characters dance to 2010s Katy Perry and Lady Gaga) with this mood in mind. My protagonist allows herself the freedom to play, get drunk, and make some mistakes. But in the cold light of day, everything looks a little different.
“London, London,” Caetano Veloso
Caetano wrote this melancholy song in English, while he was exiled in London during the military dictatorship in Brazil. The speaker wanders the streets of a picturesque London without any fear, but also without anyone “here to say hello” to, “no face to look at.” It’s an utterly alienating experience I understood as soon as I found myself alone in the United States as a teenager. Everyone walks peacefully around him, enjoying the lovely day, “while [his] eyes” can’t help but “go looking for flying saucers in the sky.” I can’t think of any other song that encapsulates the feeling of being “an alien” this well.
“I and Love and You,” The Avett Brothers
I had a roommate in college who sang this song all the time, about a group of people “headed north.” Then one day it hit me that it could be about a young immigrant like me, someone living in between two places, “one foot in and one foot back.” The speaker decides to “cut the ties [with the past] and jump the tracks / For never to return,” settles in Brooklyn, and grows “numbed by time and age” (a cautionary tale, perhaps). But it’s the “one foot in and one foot back” line at the beginning of the song that I kept coming back to. What does that look like? What’s the pull of home? How can you stay true to it when there’s the north?
“The Whole of the Moon,” The Waterboys
My protagonist leaves everything behind to go out into the world and pursue an education. But she often wonders, as Elizabeth Bishop does in her “Questions of Travel,” at what cost? “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?” This Waterboys song (which is maybe even better in Fiona Apple’s raspy voice) asks similar questions and comes back with an unexpected answer: “I wandered out in the world for years / While you just stayed in your room / I saw the crescent / You saw the whole of the moon.”
“Wherever You Go,” Pat Metheny Group
I couldn’t choose only one Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays piece, so here’s another. In this one, the guitar and the keys get lost in conversation, sometimes a heart-to-heart and other times more of an argument. Their back-and-forth somehow manages to sound so tender I always tear up when I listen to it. I often imagined my mother-daughter duo talking like this, asking each other, what are the parts of you that you can’t help but carry, wherever you go?
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.