Book Club Review: The Girl in the Photograph by Lygia Fagundes Telles

I’ve been participating in our book club from the very start. It’s our recurring event that pushed me from a simple Instagram follower, to a participating member of Latin Girls At Work.

Every month I look forward to the next meeting to see my friends, maybe make some new ones, and discuss what we liked (or absolutely hated) about the book we read. This month we read The Girl in the Photograph by Lygia Fagundes Telles.

I suggested this book as it had been sitting on my shelf for over a year. I’d purchased it when I’d gone to Brazil to visit my family and a few months after that, the author, Lygia passed away. She’s one of the most famous authors in the country and this book is often a required reading for university entrance exams in Brazil, yet I had never read her work.

After Mel, who runs the event, announced the book for this month’s book club, I picked my copy up and sat down to read. It is not an easy book to read. The narrators constantly change and the first chapter is extremely confusing. Once I’d gotten used to the format I found it easier to keep navigating the story. Three young university students are living in a boarding house run by nuns during the dictatorship in Brazil and we are being told the story from each of their perspectives.

We have Lorena, a rich law student whose lineage can be traced back to the founding of Brazil. Lia, a left wing, bi-racial social sciences student who is fighting the dictatorship. And finally Ana Clara, a psychology student from a favela who is struggling with a drug addiction.

The story is not plot focused, the characters themselves are the story. I think my mistake when first approaching the book was going into it thinking big things would happen,but it isn’t until the last four chapters that I thought we made a breakthrough in the plot. We mostly go from thought to thought with each character, living inside their minds while the world goes on around them.

Since I’d bought my book in Brazil I was reading it in the original Portuguese but most people read it in English. As someone who reads a lot of translated fiction I often wonder how much of a story gets lost in translation. Mel and I were on a train on our way to a friend’s wedding and we were both reading the book, she in English and I in Portuguese. I was a chapter ahead and had read a passage that made me wonder how it had been translated. Once Mel had finished the chapter I asked to read it in English to see the difference. The words were the same but the meaning was slightly off. It still made sense but it didn’t hit as hard as it had in the original.

This happened again later in the book and I found myself messaging Mel to see what the translation was like. In this case, the Portuguese version went:

“Com a ponta do dedo, ao invés de Argélia, escreveu Algeria, pensando em Alger. No vidro esbranquiçado pelo hálito de ambos se transferisse o e para junto do l, Algeria ficaria sendo alegria.”

The English version went:

“With one finger she wrote the word “journey” on the white moisture-coated window, thinking of arriving in Algiers. As she started to wipe it off, the middle letters ran together into a smear, leaving only the jo and the y. Joy…”

This showed me how difficult translation must be. The translator, Margaret A. Neeves needed to get creative with this. In English the words Algeria and joy are not remotely similar and it now makes me wonder about all the other books I’ve read that were translations. How much of the author’s creativity had remained and how much of it was the translator’s interpretation? If there was a book I didn’t like, would I maybe have liked it if I’d read in the original language?

I put my translation thoughts aside for the book club discussion. We were a small group this time, only six, largely because the book was not an easy read. Not everyone had finished the book and I felt relieved that I hadn’t been the only one struggling with it. Despite knowing that even if I had been the only one to struggle, they never would have judged me.

Mel always does a great job running these discussions, her questions are analytical but they also give you space to empathise with the characters and relate it to your own self or life.

Our group came to the conclusion that while the story is about these three women, their lives seem to only centre around men. Which is where we thought back to the title, in Portuguese it’s not The Women, it’s The Girls, As meninas. They are in university so they are adults, but could this allude to the fact that they are still immature? That they haven’t figured out who they are and are clinging on to the men in their lives to get a sense of purpose?

Even the one character who is supposed to be fighting the dictatorship is still only focused on her boyfriend who is in prison.

This book was one of the first written accounts of the torture that happened during the dictatorship. It kept me wondering how it would have gotten past the censors during the time. It was published in 1973 and the dictatorship happened from 1964 until 1985. We discussed that due to its title being The Girls in Portuguese, someone might have seen it and thought it would just be a “silly book about girls”. At that time there were also people working as censors who were opposed to censoring books and music and would often approve works that criticised the regime.

I think this book is a great work and I understand why it’s still read today, but it’s just not my kind of book. I’m glad I read it but I’d probably give it 3.5 stars out of 5.

Our little group during our discussion