At the end of the novel, when Ana Clara has returned to the boardinghouse, fatally battered, beaten, and abused after having attended a “party” at the country estate of her wealthy but (one feels) morally and ethically bankrupt “owner,” it is Lorena who, growing up quickly, takes charge and makes the hard decisions that will begin to set things right again. While in a strict sense, her conduct, too, at the end, can be read as grotesquely comic, in another way it can be seen as something much more serious and fraught with political import, a moment of personal realization when a hitherto unconcerned and oblivious female character/citizen realizes that things are unacceptably bad and that something has to be done. By shucking off her earlier status as an unthinking child of privilege and her silly infatuations with the kind of “forbidden” love epitomized by her obsession with M. N., and by showing, in a moment of crisis, the kind of courage, character, and leadership that she (and Brazil) needs, Lorena emerges, at novel’s end, as a symbol of Brazil’s future, its social and political restoration as a democratic republic. Indeed, her status at the end as a female harbinger of a better Brazil seems amplified by the fact that her two brothers, aptly named Romulo and Remo, end up behaving more like Cain and Abel and less like the founders of Rome. For students of Brazilian literature, Lorena’s emergence at the conclusion of The Girl in the Photograph as a powerful, new force for change will recall the similar emergence of the impoverished sertaneja, Vitória, at the conclusion of her novel, Graciliano Ramos’s canonical Vidas Secas (1938; Barren Lives, 1965). If Ana Clara represents the damage done a society by acquiescence to the seductive charms of substance abuse, mindless consumerism, and the ignoring of political tyranny, and if Lia, another admirablydrawn character, represents the need for active civic engagement and responsibility, then Lorena can be said to represent the need for Brazil’s middle and upper classes to step up for justice and democracy as well.
The final chapter, then, lends itself to being read as a political allegory, one that shows the dire consequences that result when a society—any society—decides to abandon its most vulnerable, most disadvantaged citizens and to lavish benefits instead on its elites, its most powerful and politically connected figures. No society that wishes to be a democracy can do this and survive—a point that, while obviously applicable to late 1960s and early 1970s Brazil under its military dictatorship, also speaks directly to American readers in 2012, as their own country struggles against a rising tide of reactionary and oligarchic politics, ever-growing corporate power, and the plutocratic rule of the ultra-wealthy that threatens their own democracy. While men, Telles’s story suggests (Remo, for example, lives on, after accidently killing his brother), will continue to play important roles in this struggle for social, political, and economic reform (in Brazil and worldwide), that struggle’s potency and viability is being conspicuously enhanced by the ever-stronger participation of women like Lorena. As The Girl in the Photograph makes clear, the pro-democracy, pro-justice activism of women must be encouraged and supported by all concerned.
In 2012, when, with Dilma Rousseff, Brazil now has its first woman President (something the United States has not yet been able to achieve), and when women occupy many seats of political power in Brazil, this reading of Lorena’s characterization seems more prescient that it might have back in 1973, during some of the grimmest years of the flagrantly patriarchal dictatorship. Interestingly, however, this use of strong female characters to embody the future of Brazil does not begin with Fagundes Telles; indeed, it dates back, in Brazilian literature, at least to the nineteenth-century, and writers as diverse as Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, José de Alencar, Domingos Olímpio, Aluízio Azevedo, and Machado de Assis, though it has continued on unabated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with such authors as Graciliano Ramos, Clarice Lispector, Nélida Piñon, and Regina Rheda.
Much more than a novel set during the Brazilian dictatorship, The Girl in the Photograph is very much a portrait of our times, and the issues it discusses and the questions it explores should resonate deeply with American readers, who, in numerous ways, will see much of themselves and their own culture in it. Telles’s novel will speak to women readers especially, though it will also speak to the men who love them, and to everyone who loves democracy and seeks freedom and justice for all, as opposed to the privileged few. Although it can certainly be read as an important Brazilian novel, it can also be read in a broader, hemispheric context, as an American novel with much to say to the United States of America in 2012. Yet The Girl in the Photograph will also be read as a work of fiction that does much to strengthen ties between the United States and Brazil, as well as between these two nations and their New World neighbors. Improved inter-American relations are going to play a major role in New World affairs during the twenty-first century, and writers like Lygia Fagundes Telles are making vital contributions to this mutually beneficial experience.
Finally, a word of praise must go out to the novel’s translator, Margaret A. Neves, who has given us a translation as fluent and as natural in English as it is in its original Brazilian Portuguese. This is a major accomplishment when one considers how deeply entwined are the interior monologues which characterize the three women, and by which their stories are interwoven. A careful and discerning reader and a skilled writer (as all good translators must be), Neves manages to keep the three monologues separate, distinct, and vital, and to reproduce for the English reader the many shifts in tone, semantic fields, and stylistic twists and turns that characterize the original text.
EARL E. FITZ
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY
Works Cited
Burns, E. Bradford. A History of Brazil, 2nd edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
“Ana Clara, don’t squint!” said Sister Clotilde, about to snap the photo, “Quick, Lia, tuck in your blouse! And don’t make faces, Lorena, you’re making faces!” The pyramid.
I sit down on the bed. It’s too early to take a bath. I flop onto my back, hug the pillow and think about M.N., the best thing in the world isn’t drinking the milk from a green coconut and then peeing in the ocean, Lião’s uncle said it was but he doesn’t know, the best thing is to imagine what M.N. will say and do when my last veil is removed. The last veil! Lião would write, she becomes sublime when she writes, she began her novel by saying that in December the city smells of peaches. Imagine, peaches. December is peach season, that’s true, sometimes one finds peach pits on the streetcorners with the smell of an orchard about them, but to conclude from that that the entire city is perfumed is just too sublime. She dedicated the story to Ché Guevara with a very important-looking quote about life and death, all in Latin. Imagine Latin entering into the Guevarian scheme. Or maybe it does? Suppose he liked Latin; don’t I? The delicious hours I used to spend lying on the ground, my hands crossed under my head, Latinizing as I watched the clouds. Death combines with Latin, nothing goes together so well as Latin and death. But to accept that this city smells like peaches, that’s going too far. Que ciudad será esa? he would ask, thoroughly perplexed. Tercer mundo? Yes, Third World. Y huele a durazno? Yes, in the opinion of Lia de Melo Schultz, it smells like peaches. Then he would close his eyes, or what used to be his eyes, and smile where his mouth used to be. Estoy bien listo con esas mis discípulas. Well, that’s her problem, mine is M.N., an M.N. naked and hairy, much hairier than I, he’s very hairy, kind of like a monkey. But a beautiful monkey, his face so intellectual, so rare, the right eye slightly smaller than the left, and so sad, all one side of his face is infinitely sadder than the other. Infinitely. I could keep repeating infinitely infinitely. A simple word that extends itself through rivers, mountains, valleys infinitely long, like the arms of God. The words. The movements renewing themselves like the smooth new skin of the snake breaking through