The Girl in the Photograph

Sensual & wealthy Lorena dreams of a tryst with a married man. Unhappy Lia burns with a frantic desire to free her imprisoned fiancé. Glamorous Ana Clara, unable to escape her past, falls toward a tragedy of drugs & obsession. Intimate & unforgettable, The Girl in the Photograph creates an extraordinary picture of the wonder & the darkness that come to possess a woman’s mind, & stands as one of the greatest novels to come out of Brazil in the late twentieth century.  

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One of the first Brazilian writers to address female sexuality from a woman’s perspective, Lygia Fagundes Telles was also the rare writer whose work appealed to both intellectuals & the general public.

Her most famous novel, “The Girl in the Photograph” (1973), tells the story of three starkly different young women during the regime’s most repressive years & includes graphic descriptions of officially-sanctioned torture, a subject that seemed certain to get the work banned by military censors. But in a twist of fate, the censor apparently found the book so boring that he gave up reading before he got to that part.

In later years, Ms. Telles’s work became more experimental, incorporating elements of the magical & supernatural. In her last collection of new short stories, “The Garden Gnome” (1995), she imagines a lawn decoration gaining a human soul only to remain constrained within its plaster body.

Ms. Telles’s four novels & dozens of short stories won her a number of Brazilian literary awards. Despite her literary success, she continued working as a lawyer in civil service for much of her career.