Blue Light Hours
by Bruna Dantas Lobato.
Grove Atlantic, 2024,
$17.00 paper.
For much of 2020, the pandemic restricted in-person contact, producing an array of creative solutions. Zoom cocktail hours emerged, letters briefly came back into fashion. My friends scheduled movie dates that involved coordinating the film and the time, but watching from separate homes. Yet as the quarantine lingered, the frustration grew. People began complaining of feeling zoomed out, bemoaned the loss of physical intimacy, the ability to read body language for clues. The screen wasn’t the same thing after all; we feared that, were we to remain in isolation, we would ultimately fail at keeping in touch.
It is so much more astounding, then, to recall that for some groups, such as foreign exchange students, phone and video calls have long been and will remain the only means to stay connected with the family and friends back home. Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut novel, Blue Light Hours, portrays one such relationship between a daughter who leaves her hometown in northeastern Brazil to pursue a degree in the United States and the mother who stays behind. This was once a situation familiar only to a few—I recognized the trials from the years I spent in a New England graduate school while my mother remained in Russia—but to read this novel in the years following the pandemic is to engage with the larger question it poses, which is how we cultivate and maintain meaningful relationships from a distance.
Blue Light Hours is a quiet book. Like the snow-covered landscapes of Vermont, where it is set, its atmosphere is muted, its focus selective and precise. Formally a campus novel, it employs few features of the genre. The faculty are rarely mentioned. Friendships with other students—foreigners like the daughter herself—do not evolve into side plots. This is a novel about student life which dares to admit that, for some, the studies really do take up most of the time. The daughter (who throughout the book is unnamed) spends her nights at the library. She never leaves campus. During the semester she reads the assigned books, and during the break she reads for pleasure. The occasional parties, a staple of college experience, leave her tired: “I wanted to try living in a fun American movie for once,” that segment begins, with the daughter concluding, “In the morning, we all looked ten years older.” When daylight saving time ends, she is horrified because the hour that disappeared from the night means one less hour to finish a paper. Dantas Lobato trims the novel down to expose the only thing, besides studies, that the daughter makes room for in her life: daily conversations with her mother over Skype.
In these conversations, the daughter attempts as best she can to capture her new life. She describes the campus, recounts the unfamiliar experiences of walking through fog or wearing wool, shows her mother snow falling outside her window on a soccer field. The two women share family news, local headlines, and—when they can’t find better subjects—the latest plot twists in a soap opera. The mother circulates through the same questions, such as when the daughter might visit, or if she’s happy. “What else?” she asks, even after the daughter’s exhaustive reports. “What you’ve been up to. I want to know.”
Early on, the daughter admits that sharing her experience fully with someone absent from her daily life is impossible, that she would need “as much time for telling as [she] would for living,” and yet she continues to patiently carve out the time for the Skype calls. At the end of each day she dials her mother, whose face on the screen becomes such a fixture that at one point the daughter refers to her computer as “the mother aquarium.”
Like her protagonist, Dantas Lobato moved from Brazil to America, where she attended Bennington College before earning critical acclaim as a translator. (In 2023 she won the National Book Award for her translation of Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain.) For her own writing, she has chosen a sparse but lyrical language that, in its sincerity and lack of judgment, is reminiscent of diary entries. The somewhat autobiographical nature of the novel offers one explanation for why Dantas Lobato never gives her protagonist a name. I suppose there is another. The absence of names allows the reader to perceive the roles (“mother,” “daughter”) as if they were fluid, interchangeable. A mother is also a daughter, and a daughter may have to become a mother in turn. This is where Dantas Lobato can masterfully flip a word like a coin, drawing attention to the transient roles assigned to her characters. “I would leave everything behind,” says the daughter, after the mother begins to suffer from mysterious headaches and dizziness, “my full ride and my books…and go back to be her mother.”
For a novel whose premise relies heavily on video calls, Blue Light Hours is surprising in the way it incorporates technology organically, without drawing too much attention to the fact. Fiction, in general, mistrusts technology, which can so easily make a book appear dated, or else render an important plot point obsolete. Ann Patchett once said that she looks for any excuse to not give her character a cell phone. Dantas Lobato’s approach is more nuanced—she mines the Skype calls for subtle moments that owe their nature to the medium and yet convey the fragile, at times surreal essence of the bond. Video lags behind the sound, objects crash outside of the frame, on the screen the daughter’s face appears in the corner, nested inside the mother’s face. In one scene, the daughter confesses her growing fascination with her new life, enumerating her latest college discoveries, but the signal fails her:
When I finished talking, I realized the call had frozen. I wasn’t sure how much of this outpouring she’d heard.
I hung up and called her again, and waited patiently for her to pick up. When she answered, her webcam didn’t seem to be working anymore. Instead of my mother’s face, all I saw was a white halo shining against the black background, the symbol that something was loading.
As I write this, Skype has recently become extinct. Created originally by a group of European developers, it was eventually acquired by Microsoft and retired on May 5, 2025, to be replaced with Microsoft Teams. This passing is unlikely to disturb the broader public—too many alternatives have emerged in past years. Yet in its own way Skype marked a certain era, which is now over. One of the first platforms to focus on one-to-one communication rather than large business meetings, it meant the world to foreign students. When I arrived in New Hampshire in 2009, the first thing I asked for help with was logging into my Skype from a library computer so that I could call my mother and let her know I had landed safely. That profile page, wiped out now, contains years of records about calls completed, dropped, or missed. It might seem unnecessarily nostalgic to lament a service so easily available today, and yet I wish there existed a record of how hard we tried, my mother and I, to remain close despite the enormous distance, the outrageous airfare, the impossible visa restrictions.
Set over the course of several years, Blue Light Hours traces the inevitable course of drifting apart. Its first and longest section covers the daughter’s first year in the States, while the other two catch up with the characters some years later. The central question that worried the mother at the start—when will the daughter visit—transforms into a much more difficult one: what will happen if the daughter chooses to stay? It takes the daughter a long time even to admit to the desire. A recurring image is of her alone, sneaking into the empty rooms while everyone else is away on break. She goes into the common room to inspect the drawers, roams the campus picking up the discarded perishables. At the end of these excursions, she is careful to remove any signs of her presence. It is a strange and poignant detail that conveys both the isolation that foreign students often feel and also the long and complicated process of trying on a new life to see if it fits. It is not until the summer of her freshman year, when the daughter begins housesitting for a professor, that she puts that impulse into words:
I only had $109 to my name, but I could see it, me in a place like that, calling it my own which I couldn’t have done before—before leaving home, before college, before this summer, before this place started to rub its glow of promise on me.
The thought introduces the separation. There is no Skype call to confess the feeling—this is a realization the daughter chooses to keep for herself. “I stared at the computer screen for a long time, trying to process the strangeness of this,” Dantas Lobato writes, before returning once again to the haunting image of the aquarium: “That empty tank, no mother, the glass gleaming.”
Evgeniya Dame, The Threepenny Review’s associate editor and a former Stegner Fellow, has published fiction in Zoetrope, Ploughshares, and other journals.