Sanches’s deft translation highlights the impoverished man and portrays a family broken apart by the suicide of Oséias’s sister, Lígia ... The delicate translation captures not just the ambivalence of the character, but the auditory and tactile senses of the text ... [Sanches's] prowess resonates especially through Ruffato’s constant use of staccato sentences, which detail the mundane and quotidian. The book is an anti-journey ... how can endlessly detailing tasks be so sublime? Ruffato portrays not only heartbreak, abuse, declining health, and suicide, but also nostalgia, warmth, and humor ... The reading experience, then, is also about exploring the anti-journey, rather than reveling in neat answers. The hypnotic lies in the ambivalence of the characters. The glimpses of different lives, where the reader is unable to fully immerse oneself, provides a gaze not only of a dynamic city, but of the many faces of family strife.

Ruffato subtly weaves in criticism and social issues in the narrative ... his straightforward, sometimes sad, sometimes brutally honest language also wraps you into a cocoon: you find yourself wandering the cobbled streets of an industrial Brazilian town, a place in a time that never returns. But there’s a disquiet and ruthless attentiveness hidden in the words. It’s not the umpteenth story about a man coming to terms with his inevitable end. He shows how defenseless we all are. Late Summer reflects on loneliness, existential angst, and our human ambivalences. Ruffato neatly categorizes the chaotic structure of a Brazilian man’s consciousness wrapped up in memories of the past. The inevitable structural changes in Cataguases and the influence of time has blurred Oséias memory, 'like a photograph that fades little by little until suddenly it’s only a series of whitish smudges without meaning.'

... a hypnotic translation by Julia Sanches ... The motif of silence, this ever-present ellipsis, becomes, in Ruffato’s hands, double-edged. In certain instances, he wields it to contrast the noisy complexity of adulthood/modernity with a simpler, sepia-tinged time, frequently resurrected by Oséias in passages that bleed together past and present ... Nevertheless, silence also marks the uncomfortable present, distancing the characters from one another ... While the other characters, especially the women, often come off flat—the author’s zeal to show the larger societal forces at work transforms them into types—we learn that João Lúcio has lovingly maintained the family crypt, that he hosts his employees at his country estate on weekends, that he may not know what to say to Oséias, but he welcomes him into his fancy, modern home ... It’s in this propulsive rhythm where Sanches’ translation most shines, handling the staccato reiteration of subject-verb-object with aplomb, and buoying the author’s stylistic experimentation with a few tricks up English’s sleeve ... What makes Ruffato’s oeuvre so relatable to American readers is precisely that face of Brazil we so rarely glimpse from the outside: its multiculturalism, its messy modernity and glaring inequities, the way collectively it, too, chooses silence rather than confront its own shortcomings—until it’s too late.

... it’s not the notes that Ruffato plays that matter, but the notes he doesn’t ... As for the town itself, Ruffato does a skillful job of characterizing in a way that makes it seem more than just some provincial setting for his narrative to play out (it’s his own hometown, after all) ... Stripped of paragraph breaks or typical divisions between speakers, interrupted with idle thoughts that distract Oséias from his immediate train of thought, Late Summer’s continuous prose embeds the reader so intimately within Oséias’s story that it becomes even easier to identify with the man as he feels carried along toward the inevitable ... Ruffato gives us a quiet novel about loneliness, the universal human desire to be seen and felt, and the slow cost of isolation.

Traveling in the shadow of his sister Lígia’s suicide, Oséias’ return home is meant to be a portrait of how the bonds of a family are destroyed by collective grief. But, ultimately the book fails even to tease the possibility of closure, proving itself to be a tragically claustrophobic portrait of a single man’s regret. Ruffato’s prose is relentless to the point of exhaustion. He rarely uses section or paragraph breaks, turning Oséias’ narrative into a singular stream of memories, experiences and judgments about the world that never have enough time to truly settle into the story ... The only possible question that could drive Oséias’ story is whether or not closure is possible, if his tortuous journey would somehow be worth it in the end. But the novel answers these questions before they’re allowed to be asked. What readers are left with is a story too suffocated by Oséias’ inner monologue at the expense of exposition. When the stories of his past are revealed, they’re shadowed by an all-consuming remorse ... There’s something to be said about the possibilities of fiction depicting narrators in a perpetual stasis. Where “Late Summer” fails is within its refusal to use Oséias’ condition as a foundation to extract tension from the world he traverses. Unlike, say, the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Oséias’ isolation is never meant to drive him toward any version of a catharsis, nor does it reveal the culture that fostered his hopelessness. Oséias’ fate is sealed before the first sentence.

The ailing Oseias becomes a cipher for these talky characters, whose dialogue can come off as stiff in Sanches’s translation ... The narrator’s unadorned style can have an incantatory quality, but the spell is not strong enough to make up for the brittle characters and familiar premise. Fans of ruminative works such as Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones may be disappointed.