Ana Teresa Pereira’s As personages: circularity, enigma, secret

Abstract

This article intends to contribute to the study of Portuguese writer Ana Teresa Pereira, seeking to add to the already known readings of her work a study of some narrative procedures that help to clarify the production of the enigmatic effect that emanates from each of her books. The article begins by discussing the relevance of this work in the context of Portuguese literature, contrasting it with the evident lack of media and even academic attention that it has suffered. In this context, we seek to gather the essentials of specialized criticism in order to relate the intrinsic difficulties of reading this work with its reception, calling readings by Rui Magalhães, Fernando Guerreiro, Duarte Pinheiro, and Amândio Reis. In a second moment, we try to highlight some fundamental ideas inherited from understudied literary genres in Portuguese literature—detective fiction and fantasy—using, for this purpose, the reflections of Jorge Luis Borges and Tzvetan Todorov, respectively. In a third moment, we present an analysis of As personagens (1990), Pereira’s second book, considering it from the Piglian perspective on short stories and novels. Finally, it is shown that Ana Teresa Pereira’s poetics can be understood, in her labyrinthine obsession, as programmatic in the sense that, in addition to her most highlighted themes—the (im)possibility of representation, the ghost of identity, the anguish of confrontation—it is possible to understand a deep concern and reflection on the composition of a text and a book.