cover image The Queen of the Prisons of Greece

The Queen of the Prisons of Greece

Osman Lins. Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95 (186pp) ISBN 978-1-56478-056-0

The final novel by Brazilian author Lins, best known for his novel Avolovara, The Queen of the Prisons of Greece is sublime; a must-read for serious writers and readers alike. Completed two years before his death in 1978 and set in mid-1970s Brazil, it is written in the form of a diary kept by an anonymous narrator in order to better understand the unpublished novel of--and his relationship to--his recently deceased lover, Julia Marquezim Enone. Her novel details the attempts of heroine Maria de Fran a to get benefits from Brazil's antagonistic welfare system after spending time in a mental institution, and the narrator's determined analysis of Julia's manuscript draws the reader into a mimetic funhouse of exciting, intentional confusions. In Lins's novel, the distinctions between authors and characters, between maniacally obsessive fictions and what they supposedly represent, are so fuzzy that it becomes impossible for the reader to tell what is real, including the integrity of text. Ultimately signifying that the concepts of truth and understanding are the cruelest of lies, The Queen of the Prisons of Greece proves Lins to be an author worthy of the canonization he deserves--if only for his ability to challenge and stimulate the mind. (Dec.)