Conversation 2 — Writing
What’s the point trying to understand a soul?
By Maria Brandão & Leïla Slimani
Photographs by Maria Abranches
Nunca Mais is a short story about adultery by the Azorean writer Maria Brandão, which ends gruesomely. A woman asks a man she knows to take her home and make love to her. He’s keen but he’s got a girlfriend now and says he can’t. It takes the lightest touch to persuade him he can. The two of them go home and do the things they want to do and do them well. Once the infidelity is over, the man cuts off the woman’s tongue.
“What made Leïla Slimani so deeply blue for me was her ability to feel with a rare raw depth and combine this simultaneously with a precise and unwavering focus on her craft. She funnels profound emotions into writing and conversation with precise intellectual force.”
There were four of us waiting to interview Leïla. We arrived an hour early to the Lisbon city park in which we had agreed to meet, in the middle of a shimmering June heatwave. The evening air was thick and hot, packed with locals enjoying that sliver of golden time just before sunset.
Photographs by Maria Abranches
“The blues is something disciplined and structured coupled with a state of mind… you can have either of those things but it’s the two together that make it what it is.”
— Eric Clapton
Read the full conversation in Ilhéu Magazine Issue B
Buy Issue B