Time is once more a neuralgic point of reflection when it comes to approaching the fiction written in Brazil today. After the effervescent phase in the debate between the modern and the postmodern, as writers are no longer classified by generation nor are periods or ages firmly characterized, the attempt to understand current literary production has opted for the idea of the “contemporary” in a nonbanal sense of the word. Moving beyond the sense of the simple coincidence between one writer and another, the concept critically introduces an idea that is more committed to the perspective of the simultaneous and to the notion of simultaneity among anachronistic times, thus subverting the conventionally historical continuity of past, present and future. Contrary to this modern historicity, the contemporary points to the simultaneity among historical times as a result of the dilation of a present time that is extensive and constantly open to the past that is intrinsic to it. The fundamental premise of this reformulation is the diagnosis that the present no longer serves as a bridge between the past and the future, but rather emerges as a discontinuous cross-section in a history that no longer guarantees meaning to phenomena. In spite of a present that is full of historical events, the contemporary produces the sensation of being faced with an uncertain and menacing future that has somehow already installed itself, while the past invades the present in the form of memories, images, simulacra and indexes. Thus, the present is paralyzed and becomes bound to the growing presence of a past that does not pass, that we are unable to elaborate, a past that is a living and constantly revitalized image, a type of image that invites one to perform a great rescue project. In this sense, the simultaneity of the contemporary present is the simultaneous presence of a plurality of pasts in an extensive present without clear limits.

One of the effects of this situation is the sensation of a certain historical vacuum, in political and aesthetic terms, for the Brazilian writer.