Osman Lins

This is the final novel of one of the most innovative, comic Brazilian writers of this century. It takes the form of an anonymous high school science teacher's journal about an unpublished novel written by his deceased lover, a young woman named Julia Marquezim Enone. Her novel's central character, Maria da Franca, is a destitute and mentally unstable woman at odds with the Brazilian social welfare system, from which she is trying to claim benefits for time spent in a psychiatric hospital. The journal represents the science teacher's attempt to understand Julia's novel and, the process, Julia herself and the relationship they once shared. Rather than providing him with comfort and a better understanding of his beloved, the teacher's explorations create an ever-widening circle of questions and fears about himself, her, and finally any attempt to understand anything about anyone. But the narrator's failures become the reader's comic delights.

Nine, Novena is a collection of nine stories, work that represents the turning point in Lins's career. The recurring themes of these stories - entrapment and search for the self, art versus life, and the mythic aspects of existence - are presented against the background of rural and urban life in northeast Brazil. The stylistic devices of the accessible tales (frequent shifts of tense, long sentences full of parenthetical clauses, heavy punctuation and inversions, and use of graphic symbols to suggest shifts in narrative perspective) all contribute to the multiplicity of meaning and significance of these very human stories.