The Absent Moon
By Luiz Schwarcz
Penguin Press, Feburary 28, 2023
A literary sensation in Brazil and now a global publishing event, Luiz Schwarcz’s wise and tender memoir bravely interrogates the story of his own ordeal of depression in the context of a family story of murder, dispossession, and silence—the long echo of the Holocaust across generations
When Luiz Schwarcz was a child, he was told little about his grandfather and namesake Láios—"Luiz" in Hungarian. Only later would he learn that his grandfather, a devout Hungarian Jew, had defied his country’s Nazi occupiers by holding secret religious services in his home and, after being put on a train to a German death camp with his son André, had ordered André to leap from the train to freedom at a rail crossing while Láios himself was carried on to his death. What Luiz did know was that his father was a very unhappy man, and his melancholia haunted the house. The noise that defined childhood for Luiz was that of his father in the next bedroom, tortured by insomnia, striking his foot against the bed post, seemingly for hours, night after night.
Young Luiz assumed responsibility for his parents’ happiness, as many children of trauma do, and for a time he seemed to be succeeding: he blossomed into the family prodigy, becoming an outwardly gregarious, athletic, and academically successful young man, eventually growing into a literary publisher of great promise. His house was still filled with silence, but he found a home in that silence—a home that he filled with books and with reading. But then, at a high point of outward success, Luiz was brought low by a devastating mental breakdown against which his resources were pitifully inadequate. The Absent Moon is in part the story of his journey to that point and in part his journey back from it, as Luiz learned to forge a different, more honest relationship with his own mind, with his family, and with their shared past. The culmination of that path is this extraordinary book, which is beautiful, tragic, noble, piercingly honest, and ultimately redemptive—the product of a lifetime’s reflection, animated by love and compassion and given powerful literary shape in the refiner’s fire by a master storyteller.
About the Author
Luiz Schwarcz was born in São Paulo, in 1956. He began his career as an editor at Brasiliense and later founded Companhia das Letras, in 1986. In 2017, he received the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the author of the children’s books Minha vida de goleiro (1999) and Em busca do Thesouro da Juventude (2003), and the short-stories collections Discurso sobre o capim (2005) and Linguagem de sinais (2010).