The Girl in the Photograph. Lygia Fagundes Telles

born a great beauty in the favelas, or slums, she has, upon her discovery by the fashion industry, been transformed into a highly paid model, a young woman whose material fame and fortune cannot mask the despair that eats away at her. Although outwardly the epitome of what it means for many young women—in Brazil and elsewhere—to “make it” in a consumer society, she is vitiated by her drug addition and tormented by her enervating sense of emptiness. Desiring most of all to “wallow in pleasure” (151), she effectively allows herself, commodity-like, to be purchased by a wealthy fiancé, even as she ever more desperately carries on a pitiful, and ultimately ruinous, relationship with Max, another drug addict and a dealer as well. Dramatically illustrating as it does the utter waste of two young lives, the ill-starred relationship between Ana Clara and Max constitutes one of the novel’s most tragic elements. And it requires no stretch of the imagination to read the pair of them, too, as symbols of Brazil under the dictatorship; as the people who, supposedly benefitting from the “economic miracle” that accompanied the early years of the regime—and that, according to the generals, justified its stringent measures—were, in reality, only suffering from it.

      Finally, there is Lia, the young revolutionary whose story differs from those of Lorena and Ana Clara in that it has a very distinct social and political dimension to it. The racially mixed daughter of an apostate Dutch Nazi who, having abandoned Nazism, fled to Brazil, Lia is a convincing and sympathetic character. She is also the key player in what more than one reader will regard as the novel’s funniest moment, mordant humor being a quality of Telles’s work that her many admirers do not fail to applaud. When the sexually liberated (but not, as in the case of Ana Clara, pathologically promiscuous) Lia encounters a pitiful and sexually uncertain young man, she is so bemused by his multiform innocence that, in a moment of carnal magnanimity, she decides to instruct him in the art of lovemaking—an art which, as the text makes clear, he is far from mastering. But because this key scene takes place in the very office where the resistance is being plotted, and because the specific identity of the young man in question is less important, arguably, than his gender, it reveals itself to be more politically charged than one might expect. An engagé, albeit somewhat naïve intellectual, the appealing Lia commands the reader’s attention for most of the novel.

      Her story also stands out because it was, without doubt, the one that would have been the most perilous for Telles to develop under the dictatorship. Although Lia is clearly a fictional character, her story ties in with one of the most dramatic events of this turbulent period, the 1969 kidnapping by urban guerrillas of the American Ambassador to Brazil, Charles Burke Elbrick. In Telles’s novel, Lia’s lover and co-revolutionary, Pedro, is released from prison as part of the negotiations by which, in real life, Ambassador Elbrick was freed, unhurt, by the guerrillas after the Brazilian government acceded to their demands. Also connecting the two narrative planes, as well as the three young women involved in them, are a series of recurring motifs, chief among which are Lia’s need to use her friend’s car for an act of political protest, Ana Clara’s anguished desire to scratch out the pain she feels inside her head, and, for Lorena, the telephone call that never comes from the rich and connected married man, whom she believes, in her feverish fantasy world, would be her ideal lover.

      What is perhaps most intriguing in the novel is the extent to which the author uses women as the barometer of Brazil’s social, political, and psychological health in the second half of the twentieth-century. In a way that, though focused on Brazil, is also directly applicable to our globalized and interconnected world culture of 2012, The Girl in the Photograph emphatically suggests that no society will ever be truly healthy and strong until its women are. This point—more radical, perhaps, in 1973, when Simone de Beauvoir (whose name also turns up in the text) and others were involved in the early Women’s Liberation Movement, than in 2012, when more women than ever enjoy the rights and responsibilities so long denied them—turns up time and again in The Girl in the Photograph, and in many different forms. Even the outwardly comic scene in which Lia seeks to sexually “liberate” a young man, whose obnoxious post-coital prattle suggests that he is still an unenlightened prisoner of machismo, offers the attentive reader a more serious political message: namely, that in sex, as in so many other things (the planning of a more democratic society, for example), men need, and desire, the instruction of women. As Lia puts it, “Women are finding their way. The men will come along in good time” (112).

      At the same time, however, the reader of 2012 will likely note something else about the women of Telles’s novel; they are all dependent on, and even subordinate to, the men in their lives. This is obviously (and satirically so) true of Lorena, whose monomaniacal preoccupation with a married man who has little or no interest in her borders on the absurd; but it is also true, in more sinister fashion, of Ana Clara, whose dependence on drugs is equaled only by her dependence on Max, her junkie lover. Sadly, the reader watches as Ana Clara’s twin addictions, to drugs and to Max, lead inexorably to her destruction. If Ana Clara’s is the most poignant of the three stories, Lia’s offers the clearest possibility of something different, a new, more progressive kind of liberation. Yet even here, Lia, portrayed throughout as a kind of Brazilian Rosa Luxemburg and otherwise so in command of her own body and mind, cannot, seemingly, escape being at least emotionally subservient to Pedro, her political prisoner lover. Upon his release from prison, moreover, Pedro decamps, alone, for Algeria, where he will renew his revolutionary activities. Once again separated from her lover, and by the same brand of male dominated politics that had segregated them in the first place, Lia will do anything, submit to any humiliation, in order to join him. Lesbianism also emerges in Telles’s text, first in a comic mode, as Lorena’s fretful mother worries that, if her daughter cannot soon find a man, she may end up preferring women as love objects, but also as a serious topic of discussion, one relating to the important questions of freedom, women’s solidarity and female eroticism. And, not surprisingly, some of Telles’s female characters suffer from what we might, today, term body image issues.

      An attorney, a venerated writer, and a long-time commentator on issues germane to Brazilian and world culture, Telles asks us here to consider the true nature of “liberation”—its political contexts, yes, but its emotional and intellectual ones as well. More presciently, she also asks us to eschew relationships in which one person is subservient to another person, to a particular ideology, or to a single system of thought. True liberation, Telles suggests, is much more complex and far-reaching than commonly thought, and, running the gamut from the workplace to the bedroom and from the kitchen to the political arena, she takes pains to show that it must be germane for women and men alike. For real social and political progress to occur, in Brazil or anywhere else, women must liberate themselves from their status as chattel and as second class citizens while men must, in turn, liberate themselves from the silly, outdated ideas and ways of thinking that have convinced them they are somehow innately superior beings. To move forward, Telles’s reader comes to feel, men and women will have to learn to work together for their common good, though the attaining of this admirable goal will require that both genders make drastic changes in the ways they see themselves and each other.

      There are, in fact, very few male characters in the novel, and those who do play a role are feckless and destructive in the extreme. Max, Ana Clara’s drug-addled lover, epitomizes this tendency. Other men populate the storyline but do so primarily as vague presences, imaginings or impressions held by the women, figments of their hopes, dreams, and desires. The character known as M. N. (Marcus Nemesius) is the prototype of this approach to male characterization for Telles, though most of the novel’s other male presences, like Ana Clara’s ultra-wealthy but nameless betrothed, or Lia’s fellow revolutionary and paramour, Pedro, are of this same type. The case of M. N. stands out, however, because of his real name, which evokes the idea of nemesis, and because he is, as becomes clear from his disregard for Lorena, who wastes her time pining away for him, in all respects antithetical to her best interests. The “love” she wants, or needs, to believe she feels for him is imprisoning without being in the least liberating, exhilarating, or fulfilling. One suspects that something similar could be said of Lia’s commitment to, or infatuation with, Pedro. Like the broad spectrum of women (and men) she represents, Lorena is a prisoner not merely of the idea of “love,” but to a particularly fatuous, materialistic, and superficial kind of love: a “love” not based on true comradeship and solidarity but produced and sustained