Maria Judite de Carvalho's AND HOW HAVE YOU BEEN (Tr by Margaret Jull-Costa)

To read and savor a story a day from And How Have You Been, Two Lines Press' latest and last collection of Margaret Judite de Carvalho's short fiction, is to subject oneself to a slow and precise beating, one perfectly aimed and precisely calculated blow at a time. At the conclusion of each incisive little portrait of an unusual and pivotal moment in a suddenly vivid character's life comes a denouement that, while not in the least bit funny (except when it sometimes, bitterly, is), the reader is doubled over and gasping, with de Carvalho and translator Margaret Jull-Costa looking down at her, tsking and eyeing one another with disappointment that one turned out to be such a lightweight.

(What's the opposite of a punchline? Even though what de Carvalho does is more worthy of that term than anything else I've ever seen?)

Finally, after an awkward moment or two, one of them stoops slightly and deigns to offer a graceful hand to help their victim to her feet, might brush off a little dust off, if she doesn't have a newly-chipped nail to attend to, then everyone wordlessly parts company in a swirl of impeccable mid-century skirts, leaving unspoken the obvious certainty that all three will reassemble for another round tomorrow. The reader can already hear the ominous clicks of their tasteful heels approaching in the distance as she opens the book again, as she is compelled to do. 

This, of course, makes the title of this collection perhaps the most viciously funny one I can recall encountering. Picking up this rather hefty paperback for the first time, I didn't realize just how condescending this title's question was meant to be. Even before seeing that the "you" is in italics, the reader is being challenged by the vast array of characters whose bitter little moments she is here to snoop on. They know they've got a voyeur, that she's probably trying to escape her own distressing or disappointing or maybe even traumatizing present with some nice glimpses into an imaginary Continental past.

Not so fast. 

I've been wholly ignorant of Maria Judite de Carvalho and her oeuvre; this is why things like subscriptions to specialist publishers like Two Lines Press (publishers of this volume), Charco, NYRB, my beloved Open Letter, etc are the some of the best money a reader can spend. Yes, you're letting someone else pick some of your reading (which, what do you think you're doing looking at YouTube/Instagram/TikTok/etc book content?), but that someone is a person who gets to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair and other such events, who has had to hustle to get the grant money to pay translators and buy rights and rent warehouse space and pack up shipments and... so it's gonna be someone who really loves books, and I mean really loves them, because that skill set means they could be making more money doing pretty much anything else, but they're doing this instead. So they tend to have reliable taste while also venturing further afield than I ever could. So anyway. I would not be currently dusty on the ground desperately stanching a nosebleed and missing all my lunch money without my having gotten myself a Two Lines subscription for Christmas. And I'll do it again this coming Christmas, based even just on this, to say nothing of the many other excellent works that subscription has brought me -- some of which I haven't read yet; some of which I'm saving for Halloween. 

I'm still fairly ignorant of de Carvalho (I'd love to find a biography of her!), which made my experience at her hands such a bevy of surprising blows. For instance, the first third or so of And How Have YOU Been consists largely of domestic scenes and relationship dramas -- what once was and possibly still is, in her native Portugal, regarded as "women's fiction" but then, suddenly, "The Jungle in the House" takes a turn for the subtly science fictional and, depending on your interpretation of the ending, possibly magical realist, as a painting hanging in a family home that depicts a range of extinct predator and prey animals like lions and deer and tarantulas (I did say subtly science fictional; at least for now in 2026 while I write this. Your mileage may vary, future reader) begins to influence the family's well-being in somewhat dramatic ways -- or does it?

And then "My Father was a Millionaire" takes us into a realm I'm used to exploring with someone more like T.J. Bass. Its heroine is the first successful revival from a kind of suspended animation, but she isn't exactly dazzled by the technological wonders and incredible social progress prevailing in her new surroundings. This is Maria Judite de Carvalho, here to remind you that in this future, the ladies still wear deadly, pointy-toed, thin-soled, high-heeled girl shoes. The better to kick you in the crotch with, smiling enchantingly all the while.

All this is to say, Maria Judite de Carvalho is the very, very feminine Philip K. Dick that I didn't even know I needed. Minus, you know, the agency-lacking figurant women, and the vicious virago women who are just out to undermine the haplessly bumbling men, i.e. her gender politics, even in her most wildly science fictional stories in which we have colonized both Mars and Venus, are way, way better than dear old PKD could even understand the need for, and her science fictional ideas are at least as good as his, if not better.

She also conveys, even better than PKD did, the profound sense of alienation lurking under the surface of everyday life, the way ordinary scenes can charge into the stuff of our worst sci-fi nightmares with just the barest shift of perspective. 

Before sitting down, though, she picked up the lighter belonging to Ivette or Arlette and that she had nudged underneath the armchair and she studied it closely. It was nothing special, just an ordinary lighter made of silver-plated metal. She placed it on the round glass-topped table and left. She felt as if something had drained all the color from the world which was suddenly entirely black and white (a very discreet black and white, with no strong contrast), a transformation that had arrived unannounced. She could vaguely see people, the ones who had been there and others too, and they seem to her as if they've been cut adrift, with no roots or even an aura that would allow them to reach out to her or even touch her. They suddenly seem so strange, those people. Talking like mannequins, walking about like mannequins, and with her ending up being one of them, however imperfect.

Tell me that's not straight out of Ubik, say, or a Mercerist interlude in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, or maybe a late encounter with some fellow humans already afflicted with one of Palmer Eldritch's Stigmata? Or did we wander into some Thomas Ligotti by mistake? But no, it's just an ordinary woman playing hostess to a cocktail party. 

So she's absolutely the answer, not only to "what if PKD had been a woman" but also to "what if PKD had encountered some initial success back when he was trying to be a mainstream/literary fiction writer." He would have been free, as de Carvalho was, to write whatever the hell he wanted, including science fiction. Ah, what might have been. 

Meanwhile, we did get Maria Judite de Carvalho, and you'd better believe I'm going to read everything of hers I can find. I've already acquired her novel. Grace Period, for instance, and I've got my eye on the other story collections Two Lines has already published. And if it hasn't been translated yet, I'll get back with the program of learning more Portuguese. Because I don't want to miss a thing. 

She knew that her brothers made fun of her, and that her parents, when they thought she wasn't looking, would watch her with furrowed brows or moist, uncomprehending eyes. She knew all of this and other things too, but she could do nothing to help them. They were strangers with whom she lived, and they always had been, and she felt as disconnected from them, even from her mother, as one of those fallen branches she sometimes spotted being carried along by the river, far from the banks, with no chance of getting caught up in the reeds. All right, she was there among the four walls of her room, but it almost came to the same thing.

Did somebody get the license plate number off that truck? Call an ambulance.