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 It takes the form of an anonymous high school science teacher s journal about an unpublished novel written by his deceased lover, a young woman named Julia Marquezim Enone.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, in the process,...