An Infinite Sadness

In a small village in the Swiss Alps, in the aftermath of World War II, particle physics and psychiatry grapple with a forever changed world.
Nicholas walks the wooded path between the sanitarium where he works and his home, alert to a possible menace lurking in the trees, haunted by the possibility of an evil just out of sight. His days are spent ministering to minds that have been grievously damaged by the years of brutal conflict, violence suffered and violence abetted. The patients have different stories, but none of them have left the war behind. Anna, his wife, looks for meaning among the scientists she works with, exploring the dark matter that orders the universe. Failures of nerve and intrusions from the past dog them both, and neither is able to fully inhabit the present, that moment that is also--to Einstein, and in Jewish tradition--eternity. An infinite sadness, Xerxenesky offers, may be "the size of the universe or of the empty space inside an atom" and no certainty can defeat it, no reckoning be sufficient.

Antônio Xerxenesky was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1984, and is based in São Paulo. A writer and translator, he is the author of four novels, including F (2014), which was shortlisted for the São Paulo Literature Award and longlisted for the Prix Médicis Etranger in France, and An Infinite Sadness (originally published in 2021), winner of the São Paulo Prize for Literature in 2022 and finalist of the Jabuti Prize (2022). In 2015, Xerxenesky was writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program and at the Fondation Jan Michalski in 2017. He holds a PhD in Literary Theory from the University of São Paulo and has translated over 30 books from English and Spanish into Portuguese, including novels by Mario Levrero, Fernanda Melchor, Juan Villoro, George Orwell and Herman Melville.