Book Review by Saheli Das
Mabel spends her childhood almost entirely inside the “littleroom” attached to the family’s kitchen, a space so cramped that everything inside is in miniature, including the household saints on its shelf. When live-in staff quarters started to feel like an unnecessary expense, real estate listings began rebranding the space as a “reversible room” instead, a euphemism built specifically to avoid naming what the room actually was, quarters for servants, maids, nannies, and babysitters. Even Jurandir, the building’s widowed doorman, raises his two sons in a “little-apartment” tucked beside the garage. Mabel notices that everything set aside for non-residents of the Gloden Plate Building gets prefixed with “little,” as though smallness were a condition of their existence. Live-in domestic service in Brazil isn’t simply a metaphor for slavery’s afterlife but could be also interpreted as an architectural continuity. The “quarto de empregada” (maid’s room) traces directly back to colonial-era house design, and as Brazilian housing verticalised in the twentieth century, that room migrated into the apartment blueprint. So, by the 1940s, middle-class buildings were routinely built with a maid’s room off the service area, alongside a separate service lift and entrance for domestic staff, distinct from the ones residents used.
This connection between domestic space and Brazil’s history of racial inequality is central to Solitaria. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, and Cruz places domestic labour within the broader legacy of racialised service. In the domestic labour economy, the novel depicts Black women raising, feeding, and cleaning up after white employers inside their own homes that is presented as a continuation of that history. Cruz also turns ordinary domestic objects into parts of this history. The novel’s discussion of “criado-mudo”, translated to “mute servant,” connects the mundane bedside table to the history of silent domestic service. This invisibility and silence are inherited across generations. Mabel observes that women like her mother and grandmother were denied the possibility of an ordinary childhood; instead, they became “miniature adults,” expected to shoulder burdens and responsibilities from an early age.
The bond between Eunice and Mabel represents a complex mother-daughter relationship. For years, physical closeness masks a widening emotional distance between them. Mabel realises that she wants to be nothing like her mother and begins to imagine a life radically different from her mother’s. She sees Eunice’s devotion to the wealthy family as a form of self-sacrifice and becomes determined not to repeat it.
Eunice, for her part, becomes so consumed by service to someone else’s family that she nearly misses her own daughter’s adolescence. When Mabel reveals that she was pregnant and lost the baby, Eunice is terrified that her daughter’s life is beginning to follow the same trajectory as her own, marked by teenage motherhood, dependency, and a stalled life spent orbiting other people’s households. Later, after Eunice’s own mother dies, Mabel teaches her to read and study. The daughter thus becomes her mother’s tutor, reversing their traditional roles and quietly laying the foundation for Eunice’s transformation later in the novel.
In a PEN America interview, Eliana Alves Cruz described the translation of the book into English as an example of “decolonial” translation, one that preserves the linguistic differences of Portuguese rather than smoothing them into English equivalents. This invites the English reader to sit with unfamiliar words rather than having everything explained away. Kinship terms such as “Mãe”, “Vovó”, and “Titia” are left in Portuguese throughout rather than smoothed into “Mum,” “Grandma,” “Auntie,” which keeps the intimacy of the household specifically Brazilian and Black. The spatial vocabulary of the house does something similar, rather than translate “quarto de empregada” into the more legible “maid’s room,” Brooks coins “littleroom,” a compound word that doesn’t exist in ordinary English. Food and ritual vocabulary such as “feijoada”, “farofa”, “criado-mudo” are kept untranslated too. Cruz notes that Brooks’s experience of living in Brazil, as well as his own identity as a Black man, enabled him to engage with the novel’s underlying concerns from a position of cultural and diasporic familiarity. She also describes their shared roots in the Black diaspora as significant to their collaboration.
Solitária is the original Portuguese title, and Brooks keeps it almost untouched in English, dropping only the accent. The word in Portuguese is the feminine form of “solitary,” but it’s also the everyday term for a solitary confinement cell, and the novel draws directly on this second meaning. When the maid’s room itself becomes the narrator for the book’s third part titled “Solitárias” it explicitly rejects being called a room at all. It identifies itself as a solitária, a cell built specifically to separate certain lives from the rest of the house and the people in it. That reframing colours everything that has happened there, including Eunice’s decades inside it and Mabel’s childhood there, as a kind of quiet incarceration rather than simple domestic housing. It’s worth noting, too, that solitária sits one letter off from solidária, Portuguese for “in solidarity,” and a novel that ends with its characters finally coming together, no longer isolated from one another, seems to know exactly how close those two words are. Solitaria is a novel best suited to readers interested in the intersections of race, class, domestic labour, gender, and the afterlives of colonialism, and how these structures operate through everyday spaces and relationships. It is a compelling novel that turns an ordinary domestic space into a powerful meditation on race, class, memory, and solidarity.
