Although the reading experience is a deeply personal one, I believe that we can share important insights about the literary work, specially about the bond between author and reader, a kind of gift from the power of words. All I care about here is good stories and, yes, good writing. Let's talk about Tania Jamardo Faillace, a very important voice of Brazilian fiction. As a matter of fact, I came to know Faillace's stories a year ago. And I asked myself: how come nobody talks about Faillace anymore? In fact, I've read just a couple of lines about her work on a handbook of Brazilian literature. So, I began looking for her books that are no longer in print. I can't explain but all I can say is that at the very first moment I understood that there was something waiting for me there.
She began painting and writing at an early age and her first short stories appeared in local South Brazilian journals in 1962. Also in that year, two stories, "A Descoberta" (The Finding) and "O Navio" (The Ship), were published in a now famous anthology titled Nove do Sul (Nine from the South). In 1964, the Globo, then one of Brazil's largest publishing houses, accepted Faillace's novel Fuga (Escape), bringing Faillace's work to a much larger public. Faillace's second novel, Adão e Eva (Adam and Eve), was published in 1965 by the same editor. Around the same time, she continued to publish short stories in the journals and literary magazines.
Storytelling is surely one of the oldest of arts. But stories as a literary form have been developing through the years. In Brazilian literature, after the publication in 1956 of Samuel Rawet's Contos do Imigrante (Tales of an Immigrant ), in which Rawet turned the traditional short story out, for the first time new perspectives were opened up to writers. Perhaps Rawet's breakthrough of old narrative forms represents the true beginning of the post-modern short story in the country. Since then, the form is growing, changing, evolving. One of Rawet's main devices is the interior monologue. That is, the author shows the thoughts and emotions passing through the minds of the protagonists. In Rawet, through a radicalization of this literary device, the narrative voice shifts constantly as in a kind of mad dream or vertigo.
Faillace's stories differ in an important way from the traditional narratives. From the beginning it was possible to recognize a different voice, the force of her narrative prose. She is an intimist writer. In other words, subjectivity builds the town, literally. She is pioneer as a powerful feminine voice making excluded voices count in the literary landscape of her state, Rio Grande do Sul. In "The 35th Year of Ines", published in 1971, one of her most distinguished stories, Faillace daunts us with the blankness of a life unlived. To me, this story touches greatness. In fact, Faillace slices through domestic surfaces into the emotional and psychological turmoil beneath. The interest here is centered in the development of the main character. Two women live in a house on the suburb, Ines (in English, her name is pronounced Ee-nays) and her widowed mother. Mother and daughter live a dull and solitary existence. For decades she has accepted the role of a well-behaved daughter: the virgin and unmarried daughter without sexual desires. Still her behavior and her appearance are always criticized by the family. Finally at her 34th birthday she found herself in a limit situation: "Now, she must to take a position". She must confront her last opportunities, the possibility of living a future. However, when she finally dares to live a life of her own, it is just to find out that the bourgeois conventions are always eager to revenge themselves for such an offense.
Faillace works diligently and often brilliantly at her trade. Nothing is superfluous. Words and sentences are not wasted. The descriptive details don't block the narrative. The narrative is the outcome of a single, and still complete, experience. In large part, Faillace achieves this effect by paying close attention to time and memory. And whether moving across the years just before the coup d'état in the novel Mario/Vera or just earlier and later on the same day in some short stories, she presents time not linearly, but as layers. Besides that, she knows how to transform into art the social background. Stories that make us care, stories that force us to turn the page. She shows the profound struggle of women for self-expression and liberty. For her, writing is searching. And she is hedged with personal moral convictions, because herself was unable to accept the role society had imposed upon women. Surely her stories enlarge our own sense of human possibility and responsibility.
Faillace knows how to capture the suffocating air of the 1950s and 1960s. Accordingly, Mario/Vera - Brasil, 1962/1964 was the novel she published in 1983 that recaptures the watershed years of Brazilian politics - 1964 was the year of the military coup. The story follows the main characters through a period of troubles, findings, love, and loss. Not falsely romantic or optimistic, Mario/Vera is about the impermanence of love and the certainty of pain. It is also about taking joy in companionship. Faillace has a gift for dialogue that captures so effectively the dramatic tone of the people looking for understanding and connection. The conversations are alive. In Faillace's stories women are the most complex characters. These women have in common a sense of loss - of purpose, of connection and meaning - that was widely experienced in those years. But, while there is so much sorrow in her short stories, I can't say that the author is a pessimist, since she approaches the psychological and political problems not as an end but as a start.
In the years Brazil suffered with the institutionalization of torture and censorship (1964-1985), Faillace was working as a journalist in her hometown Porto Alegre. Her struggle against the status quo never relinquished. So many of her companions involved in the same struggle for a genuine democracy in Brazil slowed down in the middle of the road, or, even worst, sold themselves for money and power, but not she; she still fights the good fight.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Tania-Faillace:-An-Important-Voice-in-Brazilian-Narrative&id=6700891
She began painting and writing at an early age and her first short stories appeared in local South Brazilian journals in 1962. Also in that year, two stories, "A Descoberta" (The Finding) and "O Navio" (The Ship), were published in a now famous anthology titled Nove do Sul (Nine from the South). In 1964, the Globo, then one of Brazil's largest publishing houses, accepted Faillace's novel Fuga (Escape), bringing Faillace's work to a much larger public. Faillace's second novel, Adão e Eva (Adam and Eve), was published in 1965 by the same editor. Around the same time, she continued to publish short stories in the journals and literary magazines.
Storytelling is surely one of the oldest of arts. But stories as a literary form have been developing through the years. In Brazilian literature, after the publication in 1956 of Samuel Rawet's Contos do Imigrante (Tales of an Immigrant ), in which Rawet turned the traditional short story out, for the first time new perspectives were opened up to writers. Perhaps Rawet's breakthrough of old narrative forms represents the true beginning of the post-modern short story in the country. Since then, the form is growing, changing, evolving. One of Rawet's main devices is the interior monologue. That is, the author shows the thoughts and emotions passing through the minds of the protagonists. In Rawet, through a radicalization of this literary device, the narrative voice shifts constantly as in a kind of mad dream or vertigo.
Faillace's stories differ in an important way from the traditional narratives. From the beginning it was possible to recognize a different voice, the force of her narrative prose. She is an intimist writer. In other words, subjectivity builds the town, literally. She is pioneer as a powerful feminine voice making excluded voices count in the literary landscape of her state, Rio Grande do Sul. In "The 35th Year of Ines", published in 1971, one of her most distinguished stories, Faillace daunts us with the blankness of a life unlived. To me, this story touches greatness. In fact, Faillace slices through domestic surfaces into the emotional and psychological turmoil beneath. The interest here is centered in the development of the main character. Two women live in a house on the suburb, Ines (in English, her name is pronounced Ee-nays) and her widowed mother. Mother and daughter live a dull and solitary existence. For decades she has accepted the role of a well-behaved daughter: the virgin and unmarried daughter without sexual desires. Still her behavior and her appearance are always criticized by the family. Finally at her 34th birthday she found herself in a limit situation: "Now, she must to take a position". She must confront her last opportunities, the possibility of living a future. However, when she finally dares to live a life of her own, it is just to find out that the bourgeois conventions are always eager to revenge themselves for such an offense.
Faillace works diligently and often brilliantly at her trade. Nothing is superfluous. Words and sentences are not wasted. The descriptive details don't block the narrative. The narrative is the outcome of a single, and still complete, experience. In large part, Faillace achieves this effect by paying close attention to time and memory. And whether moving across the years just before the coup d'état in the novel Mario/Vera or just earlier and later on the same day in some short stories, she presents time not linearly, but as layers. Besides that, she knows how to transform into art the social background. Stories that make us care, stories that force us to turn the page. She shows the profound struggle of women for self-expression and liberty. For her, writing is searching. And she is hedged with personal moral convictions, because herself was unable to accept the role society had imposed upon women. Surely her stories enlarge our own sense of human possibility and responsibility.
Faillace knows how to capture the suffocating air of the 1950s and 1960s. Accordingly, Mario/Vera - Brasil, 1962/1964 was the novel she published in 1983 that recaptures the watershed years of Brazilian politics - 1964 was the year of the military coup. The story follows the main characters through a period of troubles, findings, love, and loss. Not falsely romantic or optimistic, Mario/Vera is about the impermanence of love and the certainty of pain. It is also about taking joy in companionship. Faillace has a gift for dialogue that captures so effectively the dramatic tone of the people looking for understanding and connection. The conversations are alive. In Faillace's stories women are the most complex characters. These women have in common a sense of loss - of purpose, of connection and meaning - that was widely experienced in those years. But, while there is so much sorrow in her short stories, I can't say that the author is a pessimist, since she approaches the psychological and political problems not as an end but as a start.
In the years Brazil suffered with the institutionalization of torture and censorship (1964-1985), Faillace was working as a journalist in her hometown Porto Alegre. Her struggle against the status quo never relinquished. So many of her companions involved in the same struggle for a genuine democracy in Brazil slowed down in the middle of the road, or, even worst, sold themselves for money and power, but not she; she still fights the good fight.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Tania-Faillace:-An-Important-Voice-in-Brazilian-Narrative&id=6700891
