Book, Seminar of the rats[LS]

In Seminar dos Ratos, first published in 1977, Lygia Fagundes Telles uses all her narrative mastery to explore hidden regions of the human psyche and behavior. In several of her fourteen stories, the author ventures into the fantastic as a privileged way of accessing the real. But Lygia's fantastic refuses the facilities of so-called magical realism, presenting itself each time in a different and surprising way. Alternating narrative tenses, moving with ease from the first to the third person, deftly using free indirect speech, Lygia Fagundes Telles achieves in this book the feat of reconciling a highly complex literary construction with a unique ability to communicate with the reader.