A novella published in 1977 and written in the form of a counterpoint. On the one hand, the story of na\u00efve Macab\u00e9a, a poor migrant from the northeast struggling to survive in the big city; on the other, the writer\u2019s creative process and drama in portraying and communicating with someone distant from his socioeconomic universe: \u201cI shall attempt to extract gold from charcoal,\u201d he says. The girl from Alagoas, without knowing how to deal with urban codes in a city the size of Rio de Janeiro, unprepared to face capitalist competition, without the attributes that guarantee her success in the love and labor markets, faces the hypocrisy of people close to her. The courtship with the factory worker Ol\u00edmpico de Jesus Moreira Chaves, a northeasterner like her, does not progress. Rude and vain, he doesn\u2019t see in their relationship any chance for social mobility after all. Her colleague Gloria, in turn, an inverted mirror image of the protagonist\u2014 a Carioca \u201cborn and bred,\u201d confident in her own sexuality and femininity\u2014does not hesitate to be disloyal. The tone of the book oscillates anong compassion for such a fragile being, anguish over a form of writing incapable of communicating with the wretched, and irony, announced in the characters\u2019 names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Macab\u00e9a\u2019s journey, with an unattractive body and without professional qualifications, unmasks human cruelty and brutal social inequality in Brazil. The narrator Rodrigo S.M., Clarice Lispector\u2019s fictional mask, sees himself as an intruder in fictionally translating the \u201cglimpse of perdition on the face of a girl from the North-east.\u201d According to the preface I wrote for the book in 1990, the narrator\u2019s challenge is as much to write Macab\u00e9a as to write himself. The book discusses language on a philosophical level by putting in check the word as a means to knowledge; it is sociological, in representing class conflicts, with emphasis on the role of the writer and the inclusion of the northeastern into Brazilian society; and aesthetic, in treating the creative gesture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 1985 film adaptation directed by Suzana Amaral and starring Marcelia Cartaxo won national and international awards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":13110,"template":"","categories":[577],"class_list":["post-4109","livro","type-livro","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-novella"],"yoast_head":"\n