Book, Girls, As[LS]

In a boarding house for nuns in São Paulo, in 1973, three young university students begin their adult lives in very different ways. The bourgeois Lorena, daughter of a four-hundred-year-old family, harbors artistic and literary desires. She dates a married man, but remains a virgin. Drug addict Ana Clara, beautiful as a model, is torn between her rich fiancé and her drug-dealing lover. Lia, finally, joins an armed leftist group and suffers for her imprisoned boyfriend. The girls catch these three creatures in full motion, at a moment of impasse in their lives. Transitioning with remarkable ease from the first person narrative to the third, sometimes assuming the point of view of one of the protagonists, Lygia Fagundes Telles constructs a pulsating and polyphonic novel, which captures like few others the spirit of that troubled time and vertiginous transformations, especially behavioral. A work of great courage at the time of its release (1973), as it described a torture session at a time when the subject was strictly prohibited, The Girls ended up becoming, over time, one of the books most applauded by critics and also one of the most popular among the author's readers. "What beauty, what strength, what living and searing matter in Girls." - Carlos Drummond de Andrade "Lygia Fagundes Telles really has something of the atmospheric delicacy of a Katherine Mansfield. The difference is just this: she also knows how to write romance and As Meninas is really a high class romance." - Otto Maria Carpeaux Mandatory reading for the UFRGS entrance exam.