Book, Invention and memory[LS]

A college ball in São Paulo almost at the end of the Second World War; a rooster who leaves himself to starve after his turkey friend is sacrificed for a supper; the equivocal relationships between an old man and a boy seen in a restaurant; a Norwegian vampire who crosses the centuries in search of his beloved, a Brazilian Indian. These are some of the stories narrated in this unique book, in which one of the greatest writers in the Portuguese language intertwines the creative powers of memory and invention. Some of the stories are more strictly autobiographical, such as "Heffman", a memory of Lygia's brief experience in São Paulo's amateur theater, or "Rua Sabará, 400", an evocation of the author's daily life with her partner Paulo Emílio when the two wrote together the script for a film based on Dom Casmurro. Others detach themselves from personal experience to become true moral parables, such as "If You Can", which tells the story of the transformation of a teenager full of dreams into a corrupt politician with few scruples. There are also short stories in which the dimension of memory seems to unfold into that of fantasy, as in "The Key in the Door", in which the narrator's meeting with an old friend ends up giving rise to a ghost story. With a mix of serenity and restlessness, Lygia Fagundes Telles reviews discoveries, projects and disappointments experienced or imagined over the decades. In the warm and fluent language that made her one of the Brazilian writers most loved by readers, she fuses the comic and the moving of the human experience.