Nélida Piñon

Two months before her death, Nélida Piñon submitted her book of memoirs and most intimate confessions. In it, she recounts episodes and impressions about friends like the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as the American Susan Sontag and some of Brazil's most significant 20th-century writers, such as Clarice Lispector and Rubens Fonseca, who were also on her list of friends.

'Throughout 147 short chapters, with the high emotional charge and broad reflections that the awareness of imminent death provided her, she talks to us about her Galician family, what it was like to be a Brazilian daughter of immigrants, about Brazil,' explained Rodrigo Lacerda, the editor of Record. Other topics addressed by the writer in her posthumous work include 'the equivalence between erudition and populism in her education, love, saudade, admiration for music, and her vocation to be the mistress of her own destiny.'

'Smiling, and holding a book close to her chest, the Brazilian writer offered the Portuguese audience the image of her whole self and was grateful. Nélida knew how to accept signs of gratitude because she had always been, in addition to a talented writer, a person given to acknowledging others. [...]

I would say, therefore, that this book needs no introduction; it presents itself, as the numbered fragments follow one another, from the first one titled Eternity, in which the author, turning these two pages into a sort of extended incipit, immediately announces what is to come, to chronicle number 74, entitled The Silence of God, in which she briefly explains the genesis of her creative activity and the meaning of her life as a person of art and culture in the face of the world and humanity. Rarely does an artist manage to be so explicit about how the origin of her multiplicities is engendered in the depths of her being.' From the Preface by Lídia Jorge