Like me, Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll (1946–2017) may very well have conflated radical freedom with a lovelorn existence. In his 2008 novel Hugs and Cuddles, recently translated into English by Edgar Garbelotto, love offers a man the tantalizing illusion of having escaped from freedom, of having surrendered all responsibility to someone better equipped to handle it. At the same time, for Noll, this self-abnegating love is also a catalyst for a new kind of political unity.
