Unnatural portrait

Despite the subtitle "diaries" and the apparent chronological organization of much of the book, the text is not nonfiction. The volume presents poems, short stories, chronicles, and other textual forms. "A diary, in principle, should be published as it was transcribed from the original entry. That's where the writer's imagination came in. Instead of reproducing the texts as they emerged, I set myself the endless task of rewriting them. In other words, I transformed the diary into literature, which to some extent it already is, but only to a certain extent. And as I rewrote, I altered the lived events, giving them the form of fiction and/or poetry," explains the author. Poet Antonio Cícero also weighs in on the subject in the book's blurb: "In other words, it would be inappropriate to apply the conventional distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Likewise, although, prima facie, we tend to classify several of the texts in Retrato desnatural as poems, many others as essays, still others as chronicles, or thoughts, or short stories, or—using a neologism coined by the author himself—as interversions, the truth is that, generally speaking, nothing is less interesting to them than their conformation to this or that genre." The attentive reader will find references to great masters of Brazilian literature throughout the volume, beginning with the title, which references one of Cecília Meireles's books, Retrato natural. "Let's say I tried to 'denature' Cecília's 'self-portrait,' seeking to give it a more contemporary, less traditional appearance." In the "Respirações" series, in which the author poetically redictions words, the reference is to the author of Grande sertão: veredas: "Guimarães Rosa said, in the famous interview with Günter Lorenz, that his dream would be to one day write a dictionary. [...] What I did, I believe, was try to create a poetic and fictional glossary that highlighted various words and attributed new meanings to them."