Upon finishing this book on contemporary fiction in Brazil, it is difficult to avoid a feeling of farewell! In 2020, the political, economic and social situation in Brazil has become so aggravated that it has eclipsed a certain optimistic view that guided most of my readings of the literary production of the past few years. In the face of the neopopulist turn that brought President Jair Bolsonaro to power at the beginning of 2019, the public sphere has become tense and an aggressive polarization of opinions has perpetrated the hardened climate of constant election fighting and diminished the possibility of a serious discussion about the social, environmental and cultural challenges that threaten the country.

For the past five years, Brazil has been undergoing an aggravated economic and institutional crisis of harsh cuts in education and culture that threaten to halt or restrict research in the country and dismantle the cultural support system in the name of economic necessity, on the one hand, and the desire for ideological repression, on the other. Brazilians have been submitted to the control of a right-wing government that sees itself imbued with the mission to eliminate what has been built in the country since the democratization in 1985 in terms of the fight against inequality and the right of expression of cultural and political diversity. During the past few years, the population has begun to live under the threat of a series of disasters as a result of a generalized disregard for the environment. The long-standing environmental problems have gotten worse as a consequence of the dismantling of institutionalized mechanisms of monitoring and supervision combined with an ideological mixture of permissiveness and negationism on the part of the current government. Despite arising with the support of protests against the corruption revealed in the Workers’ Party governments, the public security policies of the new right-wing populist regime has not brought tranquility to the population, which finds itself caught in the cross fire between organized crime, on the one hand, and armed intervention police, on the other.

During the 1990s and 2000s, Brazil began to experience a certain prosperity accompanied by social achievements and slight democratic progress on human rights and by a public effort to seek justice.