The Predicament of Contemporary Brazilian Fiction and its Spatiotemporal Modalities

Abstract

This article will argue that the irruption of the present economic and political crises reveals a challenge to a certain optimism that enveloped the discourse of the contemporary since the beginning of the century. Through the readings of a small selection of novels from 2018 and 2019, by the writers Joca Reiners Terron, Chico Buarque de Holanda, Ana Paula Maia, Itamar Vieira Junior, Luiz Ruffato and Milton Hatoum, we will analyse divergent historical perspectives revealed by these narratives as implicit or explicit intervention into the present authoritarian brutalization of the national self-fashioning. In Essa Gente, the author’s ambition aims to dive into the ‘presence of the present’ in a hallucinatory simultaneity with political occurrences; Torto Arado by Itamar Vieira Junior offers another dimension of the anachronical actuality of the traumatic past of slavery; while Verão Tardio by Luiz Ruffato dives into the melancholic return of the main character to a past he cannot get rid of. In Joca Reiners Terron’s A Morte e o Meteoro and in Enterrem seus Mortos by Ana Paula Maia the retrofuturistic narratives expose the ongoing extermination of indigenous cultures in the Amazon region and the latency of the anthropocene through human interaction with animal nature.