The Queen of the Prisons of Greece by Osman Lins

 


Osman Lins has written a work worthy of Borges and Calvino, one where the narrator, an older man, writes a diary revolving around his now dead lover's unpublished novel entitled The Queen of the Prisons of Greece about a poverty-stricken, mentally unhinged teenage girl living in the city of Recife on Brazil's northern coast.

The name of the moneyless mulatto teenage girl, The Queen protagonist, is Maria de França; the name of the narrator's now dead young lover is Julia Marquezim Enone; I'll give the name of Bento to the unnamed narrator, a high school teacher, age fifty, in São Paulo, a voracious reader and lover of literature teaching “what used to be called Natural History.”

It's as if Osman Lins is masterfully jugging three literary balls at once, or maybe four or five or six. Since there are so many ideas and happening on a number of levels, I'll make an immediate shift to a highlight reel -

SPELLBINDING SYNOPSIS
Bento reluctantly provides a thirty-page synopsis of Julia Marquezim Enone's The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, reluctant because “it spread and resurrects the common idea according to which the story is the novel, not one of its aspects, among those that illustrate the art of narrating the least.” But in this case, and here's the clincher for Bento, “summarizing the facts narrated in the book we are to discuss is indispensable”.

Thus we are given the compelling overview of the tale of Maria de França, a teenager who, along with her mother and many brothers, migrated from the countryside to the city of Recife. We follow her odyssey as maid, fired factory worker, insane asylum inmate as she eventually joins the ranks of thousands of destitute seeking an unemployment pension in the endless labyrinth of a nightmarish bureaucracy and legal system. Along the way, she has a brief engagement to a soccer player/night watchman and takes under her protection a six-year-old anemic and slightly retarded orphan girl who is killed by machine-gun bullets in her apartment during a police raid.

However, this is only a synopsis. Throughout his ensuing journal entries, Bento offers commentary and insights as he delves deeper into details of his dead lover's novel.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY
As we have come to expect from a work of Latin American literature, social commentary abounds. Bento notes: living in suburban squalor, frantically running from one government department to another in her quest for a pension, Maria de França becomes swallowed up in what forms the city's “culture of poverty". And how extensive is this squalor and poverty? Osman Lins doesn't hold back, he has Bento examine the way urban decay - seedy, filthy, stinking disgusting - impacts not only Maria de França but also the past life of his dead lover, Julia Marquezim Enone. And he expands out from there – to poor people in all of Brazil, in South America, in all nations, even touching a country like Vietnam via its war with the US.

MAGICAL
Likewise with magical realism. Maria de França repeatedly hears a ghostly voice warning her to watch out since someone is out to destroy her life. Also, Maria “begins to imagine that a huge fish is growing under her feet, in the subterranean fire, that this fish one day will erupt out of the ground beneath Recife and head for the sea, thrashing about with its tail.”

MULTIPLE FACETS OF FICTION
However, what truly sets Osman Lins' novel apart is all of the many references and reflections on the nature of fiction, the writing of fiction and the reading of fiction.

Up for a fascinating query on what is meta in meta-fiction? Bento on Bento: “At this point I conceive of something unfeasible: a work that would present itself as double, built in layers and purporting to be its own analysis. For example: as if there were no Julia Marquezim Enone or The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, as if the present piece of writing were actually the novel by that name and I myself were a fiction.”

Ha! This is very funny – after all, the unnamed narrator, the man I'm calling Bento, is, in fact, a fictionalized narrator in a novel and the title The Queen of the Prisons of Greece is, in fact, the title of the Osmond Lins novel, copyright 1976, under review.

Bento questions just how much faith we should put in Maria de França as first-person narrator since, among other considerations, she could be judged completely mad.

How many times have you heard someone say that they really got into a novel? Bento appears to take this phenomenon to the extreme when he looks back on a frightening episode in his life, a time when his eyes failed him. "Belatedly and disconnectedly a question about the way in which, during the month of September, in my days of blindness, I saw myself inside the novel, moving in it, is beginning to bother me." Hey, wait a minute! Should we question the reliability of not only Maria as narrator but also the reliability of Bento the narrator? Sounds like any complete objectivity is, at best, on shaky footing. On how many levels should we view the following quote:

"Thus there is a coming and going in the book, an oscillatory and arbitrary movement in the relationship between the character who acts and its double who speaks even though they both use the same pronoun, whose nature becomes mutable. The reader - along with the critic - becomes embarrassed and insecure: he's faced with a completely unreliable narrator who works hard at not deserving his trust by dint of a game of hit or miss, of apertures and restrictions in her visual field, at times so limited that it borders on absurdity."

Rather than my own sentence to conclude my review of this Osman Lins novel, I'll let the Brazilian author have the last word by way of Bento musing on Julia Marquezim Enone's novel. Is this a legitimate move on my part? Hint: I did reference Borges and Calvino back there.

"One can see in The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, in the fact that it conceals, beneath an appearance of simplicity, a complex and - the word leaps out at me - abysmal structure, an attempt at imitating the appearance of the world and, concealed beneath appearances, its truth, slow and unlikely to reveal itself even to a trained observer."


Brazilian author Osman Lins, 1924-1978