SAUDADE a Novel by W J O'Reilly

Every morning before dawn, Wyatt O'Reilly walks the abandoned gun batteries of Fort Hancock on the Jersey Shore, Nordic poles striking the frozen ground, while Erik Satie's Vexations plays in his ears—a piano piece written to be repeated 840 times without resolution.

He is seventy-six years old. He has been a cab driver in New York City, founder of three schools, a husband twice over, a father to sons he failed in ways he is still learning to name. His grandchildren live ten feet away, on the other side of a fence he cannot cross. His Buddhist practice—thirty-seven years of kneeling before a scroll at dawn—is the only discipline that has kept him present to his own life.

Saudade is the record of that practice applied to memory. Moving between a Depression-era kitchen in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his Belgian grandfather made miracles from nothing, and the yellow-walled house in Belmont where his marriage unraveled, between the night shift on Queens Boulevard and the morning light on a Massachusetts field, Wyatt excavates a life one thousand words at a time.

This is not a book about resolution. Like the Satie piece that accompanies its writing, it refuses the comfort of arrival. It is instead a book about presence—about what it means to show up, again and again, for the discipline of being here. For the father who was more there than he thinks he was. For the man still practicing how to receive what the world offers.

"The 840th repetition does not resolve. It simply stops. The silence after is the silence that was always underneath."

A meditation on memory, fatherhood, failure, and the stubborn daily work of staying in one's own life, Soudages is a literary novel in the tradition of Knausgård and Proust—an unflinching excavation of what we inherit, what we pass on, and what we carry to the end.

About the Author

W J O'Reilly is the author of twenty-five books across multiple genres. A former cab driver, school founder, and educator with an EdM from Harvard, he lives in Massachusetts with his wife, a judge. He still rises before dawn to chant and write.