When you read something genuinely new it’s hard to describe it—you end up settling for comparisons—and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It’s ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind.
— Zadie Smith
The gripping English debut of the famous and hugely talented Brazilian writer Victor Heringer, who died tragically young
In the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, one summer in the 1970s, a family—a husband and wife, their daughter, and their crippled teenage son Camilo—take in an orphan named Cosme. The boys unexpectedly fall in love, but an act of violence shatters their intimate world and changes their lives forever. Decades later, when Camilo returns to his hometown, he is haunted by his first love and the long shadow of Brazil’s military dictatorship.
At once an incisive and unforgiving study of Brazilian society and a fluid, queer coming-of-age story, Victor Heringer’s exhilarating and moving novel is worthy of Machado de Assis.
When you read something genuinely new it’s hard to describe it—you end up settling for comparisons—and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It’s ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind.
— Zadie Smith
It’s the first book in a long time I’ve wanted to read again the moment I finished it. … The book’s texture is marvelously diffuse and porous, allowing wild movements through (and juxtapositions of) time…I can’t think of many pages in books I’ve read in recent years that are such pure demonstrations of virtuosity.
— Garth Greenwell
One of the best novels in recent years.
— Asymptote
The brief, precise scenes – incorporating photos, lists and handwritten passages – enable Heringer to cover a great deal in a short space and make a potentially gloomy story into a multilayered celebration of life. That the author died in 2018, aged 29, is a loss to international literature.
— The Guardian
Heringer once said that he loved the serendipity of creation, like exploring a mountain and discovering new places to twist your ankle. His commitment to heterodoxy, singularity and incongruity made him an artist of the loose end. He killed himself aged twenty nine, when he was beginning to make his name. Perhaps the ‘who knows why’ that whispers through all his work applies also to this.
— Lorna Scott Fox, New Left Review
The novel’s genius emerges from this condition of abject solitude: attempting to write his way out of a world in “perpetual moral hangover,” Heringer finds beauty and humor even in tragedy.
— Adam Morris, The Baffler
Grand and strangely devastating.
— Charlie Lee, The New York Review of Books
Heringer's writing is a braid of the tirelessly hilarious and the deadly serious.
