What is the power of music to provoke emotional states, and therefore actions in the listener? If played in a certain way, or at a certain time, can a song transform the natural world? Or does nature write its own music that we might learn to hear?

In Jazz of the Affections, Margarita, who grew up in a Chilean region of Valparaíso suffering drought and parched rivers due to the practices of the avocado plantations, falls in love with Finnegan, an Indian-British musician. The two initially collaborate in England, making compositions that have the power to alter human activity. After understanding the true emotional consequences of their work, however, they decide to stop.

Finnegan confesses to Margarita his mother’s ideals, her desire to use acoustics for political change, and her ambition that he compose a work called The Great Mirror of the World, an impossible project to change the world through music. Margarita, for her part, hopes to address the more specific problems of the dry land where she grew up. Together the two move to Chile and begin to explore sound as a means of listening, and the idea of the devil as the power of nature itself.

Ranging from Berlin to Cambridge to Kuwait City to Valparaíso, Jazz of the Affections questions the relationship of art to the surrounding world and the wagers made for love in the improvisational jazz of events, in which any score can be written down only in retrospect.

Jessica Sequeira is a writer and musician. She has published A Furious Oyster, A Luminous History of the Palm, Golden Jackal / Chacal Dorado, Rhombus and Oval, Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age and Taal. She has also translated numerous authors, including Osvaldo Lamborghini and Augusto Monterroso for Sublunary Editions.

Format: Paperback

Author: Sequeira, Jessica

Publisher: Sublunary Editions

Pub Date: July 17, 2025

Category: Fiction / Music

ISBN:9781955190879

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Jazz of the Affections