A rainha dos cárceres da Grécia

by Osman Lins, Adria Frizzi

Osman Lins segue a trilha de inovações formais de Nove, novena (1966) e Avalovara (1973) nesta que foi a última obra de ficção do autor. Nele, "um obscuro professor secundário" de biologia tenta, dia após dia, interpretar o único romance escrito por sua falecida amante, Julia Marquezim Enone, chamado A Rainha dos Cárceres da Grécia . Durante a leitura, a voz do professor se mistura com a de sua musa, e ambas se dissolvem na trajetória da personagem-narradora criada por Julia, a delirante Maria de França, que empreende uma jornada kafkiana pelos labirintos do INPS em busca da aprovação de sua aposentadoria por invalidez.

Ao desvendar as desventuras e delírios de Maria de França, o professor contamina a narrativa com suas lembranças. A leitura do livro dentro do livro torna-se uma forma de o professor entender as suas angústias e as de sua amada. Através da memória, as histórias e seus relatos transcendem o tempo, num grande exercício de experimentação da escrita.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Brazil, Portuguese Literature, Latin American

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Osman Lins (July 5, 1924, Vitória de Santo Antão, Pernambuco, Brazil – July 8, 1978, São Paulo, Brazil) was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. He is considered to be one of the leading innovators of Brazilian literature in the mid 20th century. He graduated from the University of Recife in 1946 with a degree in economics and finance, and held a position as bank clerk from 1943 until 1970. From 1970 to 1976 he taught literature.

His first novel, 0 Visitante ("The Visitor"), was published in 1955. His later publications would bring him international recognition and establish his reputation—Nove, Novena (1966; "Nine, Ninth"), a collection of short stories, Avalovara (1973), a novel, and A Rainha dos Cárceres da Grécia (1976; "The Queen of the Grecian Jails"), a novel/essay. Lins was the recipient of three major Brazilian literary awards, which included the Coelho Neto Prize of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Osman Lins has written a work worthy of Borges and Calvino, one where the narrator, an older man, writes a diary revolving around his now dead lover's unpublished novel entitled The Queen of the Prisons of Greece about a poverty-stricken, mentally unhinged teenage girl living in the city of Recife on Brazil's northern coast.

The name of the moneyless mulatto teenage girl, The Queen protagonist, is Maria de França; the name of the narrator's now dead young lover is Julia Marquezim Enone; I'll give the name of Bento to the unnamed narrator, a high school teacher, age fifty, in São Paulo, a voracious reader and lover of literature teaching “what used to be called Natural History.”

It's as if Osman Lins is masterfully jugging three literary balls at once, or maybe four or five or six. Since there are so many ideas and happening on a number of levels, I'll make an immediate shift to a highlight reel -

SPELLBINDING SYNOPSIS
Bento reluctantly provides a thirty-page synopsis of Julia Marquezim Enone's The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, reluctant because “it spread and resurrects the common idea according to which the story is the novel, not one of its aspects, among those that illustrate the art of narrating the least.” But in this case, and here's the clincher for Bento, “summarizing the facts narrated in the book we are to discuss is indispensable”.

Thus we are given the compelling overview of the tale of Maria de França, a teenager who, along with her mother and many brothers, migrated from the countryside to the city of Recife. We follow her odyssey as maid, fired factory worker, insane asylum inmate as she eventually joins the ranks of thousands of destitute seeking an unemployment pension in the endless labyrinth of a nightmarish bureaucracy and legal system. Along the way, she has a brief engagement to a soccer player/night watchman and takes under her protection a six-year-old anemic and slightly retarded orphan girl who is killed by machine-gun bullets in her apartment during a police raid.

However, this is only a synopsis. Throughout his ensuing journal entries, Bento offers commentary and insights as he delves deeper into details of his dead lover's novel.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY
As we have come to expect from a work of Latin American literature, social commentary abounds. Bento notes: living in suburban squalor, frantically running from one government department to another in her quest for a pension, Maria de França becomes swallowed up in what forms the city's “culture of poverty". And how extensive is this squalor and poverty? Osman Lins doesn't hold back, he has Bento examine the way urban decay - seedy, filthy, stinking disgusting - impacts not only Maria de França but also the past life of his dead lover, Julia Marquezim Enone. And he expands out from there – to poor people in all of Brazil, in South America, in all nations, even touching a country like Vietnam via its war with the US.

MAGICAL
Likewise with magical realism. Maria de França repeatedly hears a ghostly voice warning her to watch out since someone is out to destroy her life. Also, Maria “begins to imagine that a huge fish is growing under her feet, in the subterranean fire, that this fish one day will erupt out of the ground beneath Recife and head for the sea, thrashing about with its tail.”

MULTIPLE FACETS OF FICTION
However, what truly sets Osman Lins' novel apart is all of the many references and reflections on the nature of fiction, the writing of fiction and the reading of fiction.

Up for a fascinating query on what is meta in meta-fiction? Bento on Bento: “At this point I conceive of something unfeasible: a work that would present itself as double, built in layers and purporting to be its own analysis. For example: as if there were no Julia Marquezim Enone or The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, as if the present piece of writing were actually the novel by that name and I myself were a fiction.”

Ha! This is very funny – after all, the unnamed narrator, the man I'm calling Bento, is, in fact, a fictionalized narrator in a novel and the title The Queen of the Prisons of Greece is, in fact, the title of the Osmond Lins novel, copyright 1976, under review.

Bento questions just how much faith we should put in Maria de França as first-person narrator since, among other considerations, she could be judged completely mad.

How many times have you heard someone say that they really got into a novel? Bento appears to take this phenomenon to the extreme when he looks back on a frightening episode in his life, a time when his eyes failed him. "Belatedly and disconnectedly a question about the way in which, during the month of September, in my days of blindness, I saw myself inside the novel, moving in it, is beginning to bother me." Hey, wait a minute! Should we question the reliability of not only Maria as narrator but also the reliability of Bento the narrator? Sounds like any complete objectivity is, at best, on shaky footing. On how many levels should we view the following quote:

"Thus there is a coming and going in the book, an oscillatory and arbitrary movement in the relationship between the character who acts and its double who speaks even though they both use the same pronoun, whose nature becomes mutable. The reader - along with the critic - becomes embarrassed and insecure: he's faced with a completely unreliable narrator who works hard at not deserving his trust by dint of a game of hit or miss, of apertures and restrictions in her visual field, at times so limited that it borders on absurdity."

Rather than my own sentence to conclude my review of this Osman Lins novel, I'll let the Brazilian author have the last word by way of Bento musing on Julia Marquezim Enone's novel. Is this a legitimate move on my part? Hint: I did reference Borges and Calvino back there.

"One can see in The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, in the fact that it conceals, beneath an appearance of simplicity, a complex and - the word leaps out at me - abysmal structure, an attempt at imitating the appearance of the world and, concealed beneath appearances, its truth, slow and unlikely to reveal itself even to a trained observer."


Brazilian author Osman Lins, 1924-1978

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last novel by a noted Brazilian writer (smiling in his author photo—always a good sign). Part highbrow reflection on the art of fiction in relation to reality, part faux-academic analysis of an unfinished manuscript by the narrator’s deceased inamorata. Diaristic in form, immensely creative and erudite in content, Prisons of Greece is a captivating experiment with occasional patches of dreariness and esoterica. Builds to a dazzling and disturbing climax when the writer’s handle on reality loosens completely—a response to unutterable loss? a writer overanalysing himself into madness? absorption into his lover’s manuscript? Loved this. Also from Lins in English, Avalovara and Nine, Novena.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Hot Damn! Another little nugget I've Read but not Review'd!

This one here's for all you lovers of books about books. It's a novel in the form of a diary about an unpublished novel-in-manuscript. It's Dalkey. It's critifiction. It's metafiction. It's translatedfiction. Naturally, it's BURIED, just like Lins' masterwork Avalovara.

What is critifiction you ask? Here's a random snippet I just now flipped to ::

São Bernardo, linked to certain realistic conventions, frankly presents itself as written, and by a man with a rudimentary education; consequently it attempts a diction appropriate to the character, an objective literarily impossible, since it is necessary that the book, while convincing us of its primitivism, achieve at the same time--surreptitiously, of course--a high expressive level; this conflict, troublesome for the real author and for the pseudo-author alike, rises to the thematic level. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, free of the requirements bogging down Graciliano's project, appears as immediately unacceptable, affecting an orality that the text, among the most elaborate, even though not cultured, ceaselessly contradicts: fiction is openly established in the act of enunciation itself. The gunman Riobaldo tells his story viva voce to a problematic interlocutor, a story related in a 550-page volume whose falseness, openly assumed, is never concealed. [sorry about forgetting the page=citation]

. Happy to quote that for you because of the unashamed discussion of a novel you have no access to. Yet.

[Daniel KML · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Reviewing in English so that all my Goodreads friends can read it)

A rainha dos cárceres da Grécia is the last novel written by Osman Lins, one of Brazil’s most original 20th-century writers—among the likes of João Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst, Ariano Suassuna, Graciliano Ramos, and a few others.

If you enjoy intelligent novels that explore the mysteries of fiction itself, I highly recommend this one. It’s inventive and intellectually stimulating in both structure and prose.

In A rainha dos cárceres da Grécia (translated into English as Queen of the Prisons of Greece), you’ll find:

• A narrator who is a natural sciences teacher, but who spends most of his time immersed in literary reading
• His beloved has recently died, leaving behind an unpublished manuscript: a novel titled Queen of the Prisons of Greece
• For that novel, the narrator decides to write a review (wich is the actual novel that the real reader is reading) —part homage, part attempt to give the work of the woman he loved a longer life (at least, that’s the initial motivation)
• Yet the task proves so complex—so entangled are author and oeuvre for this narrator—that he turns his review into a sort of diary, with daily entries examining different aspects of this fictional novel (his thinking constantly changes as he delves deeper into its meaning)
• One can imagine the richness of themes and the potentialities that such a premise allows (if handled by the right person)
• And Osman Lins explores them brilliantly, developing not only the narrator’s reflections on art and fiction (can we ever succeed/fail in trying to read the meaning of a novel?), but also on love, time, space, identity, and the broader Brazilian context of the 1970s—marked by inequality, dictatorship, bureaucracy, and the divide between rural and urban life

Part Borgean, yet deeply ethical and politically aware, A rainha dos cárceres da Grécia is a literary achievement that deserves a much wider readership

[Arthur Dal Ponte Santana · Rating 5 out of 5]

A maior parte das minhas opiniões sobre esse romance está na review do canal "Livrada" (obrigado, Lucas), mas talvez dê pra falar algo meio original aqui. Sigamos.

O que se mostra peculiar aqui é como esse romance é também ensaio. Não é romance direto, não tem a forma típica de um romance, mas é ele mesmo crítica de um romance inexistente. Explico: o título do livro de Osman Lins faz referência a um livro não publicado, fictício, escrito por uma personagem de seu homônimo. Essa escritora, personagem ausente porque morta, chamada Julia Marquezin Enone, foi amante do narrador sem nome do romance de Osman Lins. Esse narrador decide preparar material em um diário a fim de, após um tempo, escrever um ensaio sobre o livro de sua amante.

Dá pra ver a multiplicidade de níveis narrativos logo de cara. Osman intercala relatos pessoais do narrador, excertos jornalísticos, partes desse romance fictício e outras citações para montar uma espécie de romance sobre a interpretação. Um romance sobre a crítica de romances, por assim dizer. Nessa sobreposição de camadas e mais camadas, o leitor pode ver não só um domínio da forma romanesca, como também da própria crítica. O que me fica como pergunta é aquele questionamento tipicamente romântico: quanto a crítica também não é parte da obra? Quanto não é o ensaio também arte?

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best way, I think, to communicate the allure of this book is by quoting it:
The narrator himself describes the novel on page 45:"At this point I conceive of something unfeasible: a work that would present itself as double, built in layers and purporting to be its own analysis. For example, as if there were no Julia Marquezim Enone or The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, as if the present piece of writing were actually the novel by that name and I myself were a fiction."
Again, on page 96: "The hybrid space, in which a fixed space and a mobile space come together, is more suggestive and intriguing than the option favoring one alternative or the other."
And, on page 149: "the nature of the artistic object, which is never a depository of meaning but rather a detonator of meanings";
And finally, on page 177: If Maria de Franca's disease (here not so much mental as verbal),"making words like before and after impenetrable, tends to dilute the book in time,the occurrence of real historical events--not in the sequence in which they would have taken place but disconnected, loose, contingent upon random encounters with outdated snatches of news."

[Lívia Santana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meu sentimento sobre este livro é de ambivalência. Impossível não reconhecer a habilidade e até a genialidade do Osman Lins. Mas que raiva do formato dessa narrativa que mantém a gente à margem ao mesmo tempo em que parece expor e analisar tudo e nem deixa o leitor se afeiçoar a personagem nenhum, porque a narrativa não fica tempo suficiente focada num personagem pra fazer com que ele seja palpável!

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sinceramente, que livro CHATO. Foi a pior leitura obrigatória da minha faculdade até agora, arrisco dizer que foi também a pior da vida. Daria uma estrela só, mas estaria mentindo, pois, querendo ou não, esse livro tem um valor imensurável aos que estudam a narrativa, e é o meu caso. Dou meus kudos ao autor por trazer uma ficção ensaística em forma epistolar, o que foi muito criativo, no entanto, dizer que a execução foi péssima seria eufismo. Esse é o tipo de livro que se desenvolve por períodos extensos (o que não há necessidade sintática nenhuma para o tamanho de uns, sinceramente) e se torna um purgatório já nas primeiras páginas. O que se salva em "A rainha dos cárceres da Grécia" são as passagens "escritas" por Julia e o resumo da obra de Julia feito pelo ensaísta (personagem principal e dono do diário). Dói-me escrever isso, mas questionei minha escolha em cursar Letras do tanto que eu odiei a experiência e estava a dois passos de trancar o curso oficialmente. Sim, saio desta leitura como uma nova pessoa: traumatizada.

[Un Perogrullo]

Ya quisiera uno estar escribiendo una tesis doctoral sobre lit. brasilera, sazonada con lo más sonado de la critica posmoderna (deconstructivismo, escuela de Frankfurt, crítica rusa, psicoanálisis, poscolonialismo y etc) y encontrarse con semejante joya. La historia metanarrada (¿infranarrada?), que da origen al título, me recordó a la protagonista de La hora de la estrella, de la también brasilera Clarice Lispector. Hay una extraña y encantadora similitud en ambos personajes femeninos, pobres, audaces y medio tontos, y su fatalismo hilarante.
Un momento histórico, supongo, en que la literatura latinoamericana efectuaba, tardíamente, una suerte de muerte de la literatura.
Una novela muy original e interesante e inteligente y discursiva y árida y aburrida.

[Cicero Marra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perto do labirinto de enigmas e símbolos que é "Avalovara" e "Nove, Novena", "Rainha dos Cárceres da Grécia" é muito mais acessível, muito mais atraente, e dá pra ler até o final sem se achar muito burro. Além do mais, tem um valor didático que faz dele (ou deveria fazer) um dos favoritos das faculdades de Letras, já que é ao mesmo tempo uma aula prática de teoria literária e um experimento de inversão: "e se existisse um ficção construída com pedaços de sua própria análise?"

Enfim, é inteligente e até genial, mas ainda não substitui a ficção. Pelo menos pra mim.

[Yuri Deliberalli · Rating 5 out of 5]

O último romance escrito por Osman Lins parte de um livro inexistente, o tal A rainha dos cárceres da Grécia, para elaborar uma amálgama de ensaio, relato jornalístico, expiação de memórias da falecida amada e interpretação literária, numa prosa inventiva que mescla esses aspectos e acaba por confundir, angustiar, frustrar e provocar o seu leitor a entender esse narrador nostálgico, emocionalmente desiludido com as burocracias que têm que enfrentar e profundamente intrigado em resgatar a imagem da mulher que amou por meio de sua arte.

[Grace Hall · Rating 1 out of 5]

If I could give less stars I would. Only the first 20 pages are even worth reading. The rest mean nothing, say nothing, so nothing for the story. It feels like it shouldn’t have been written at all.

[Rafaela · Rating 5 out of 5]

li três vezes e não entendi tudo cinco estrelas

[Soraya Viana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incrível a interseção entre acontecimentos no Brasil dos anos 70 e o universo criativo e da escrita que Osman faz nesse romance. É uma obra riquíssima!

[Filipe Oliveira · Rating 1 out of 5]

Osman Lins sobressai-se pelo refinamento de sua escrita; não por suas histórias.