The war is within us

The War Is Within Us is the third volume of the ambitious and unfinished novel cycle of the Broken Mirror trilogy.

One character stands out among the more than two hundred featured in the "The Broken Mirror" trilogy: Rio de Janeiro. Here, Marques Rebelo covers the turbulent early 1940s, recording the impact of the distant Second World War on the daily life of Rio de Janeiro society. A multifaceted urban canvas, this work defies classification and ignores narrative conventions, blending fiction and memoir, diary and chronicle of customs, always through the lens of social critique. It is a Rio-romance and a Rio-romance. And it is a roman à clef, where real characters from the city's intellectual life are easily identified. The plurality of records and points of view blurs the line between the individual and intimate dimension and the historical-cultural testimony, drawing on recurring motifs: time, death, women, social relations, childhood. The autobiographical and the political-social merge.

A member of the 1930s Generation, whose literature denounced Brazil's various forms of misery, Marques Rebelo was above all passionate about the city, its Carnival and soccer, its humble people, and its middle class—from which he drew most of his characters. In this sense, he was an heir to Manuel Antônio de Almeida, Machado de Assis, and Lima Barreto. He was already a renowned author when he began writing The Broken Mirror, followed by the publication of The Trap Shopkeeper (1959) and The Change (1962). The War Is Within Us (1968) is a sobering account of a world in transition, in which remnants of a pre-industrial city coexisted with its disorderly growth and competitive modernization. The underworld, with its cunning and trickery, was still romantic, but it showed worrying signs of what was to come.

Despite not reaching the planned seven volumes, interrupted by the writer's death in 1973, O espelho partido contributed decisively to Marques Rebelo establishing himself as one of the greatest urban prose writers in Brazilian literature.

- Luciano Trigo, journalist and writer