The elective fantasies

From the same author of the award-winning Certainties and Words .

In "As fantasias eletivas" (Elective Fantasies ), Carlos Henrique Schroeder offers an essay on the human soul. In the touristy Balneário Camboriú, Renê, a hotel night clerk known as Mr. Alcohol—both for his meticulous cleaning of the counter and his rampant alcohol consumption—is trying to rebuild his life. One night, he meets Copi, an Argentine transvestite, writer, photographer, and poet, who arrives in town also to bury her past and leaves her workbook with Renê as her escort.

Copi passes by the hotel every day, and despite the initial strangeness, she and Renê soon become friends. The close relationship they develop seeks to alleviate their loneliness, as they both attempt to start over after past traumas. Balneário Camboriú, the setting for this new beginning, is itself a character in the story—a beautiful resort town whose workers grant tourists and outsiders access to its beauty while simultaneously preventing these same workers from enjoying it.

A twist of fate leads Renê to read Copi's writings and become the only one to have access to her astonishingly beautiful photographs. This is when a book opens within the book, revealing more about the impossibility of things, the solace Copi found in photography (which allows her to write through images), and her incomplete poems.

Elective Fantasies combines prose, poetry, and photography to reflect on loneliness and literary creation, and shows how literature, real literature, is above all made of blood.