In the modern literary tradition, one of the significant features in the recognition of the new autonomy that characterized literature as distinct from the fine arts was metaliterature. The book appeared as an internal reference to the book, and fiction became the protagonist of fiction itself, in a recursion that took literature as a theme for literature. This type of metafictionality has existed since Cervantes and Shakespeare and in countless examples from Luigi Pirandello to Jorge Luis Borges, at the height of literary modernism. The effect of metaliterariness, which was created when the book was represented inside the book itself, was interpreted as an unsettling interrogation of the boundaries between reality and fiction. It provoked an impression of a realized plot as a determining structure for the heroes in search of truth, and simultaneously fictionalized the contingent events of the real. One thus exalted the reality of poetry and narrative, whose strength could enchant the profane world, and at the same time, one casted doubt with respect to the conventional limits of fiction in the face of reality. In a way, it was this metaliterary effect that became synonymous with literariness, to the extent that it provoked an experience of autonomy that in modernity would identify its aesthetic reality.

In Luiz Ruffato's recent books, the author creates a peculiar metafictional game that seeks to take modernist logic in another direction, even though structurally, at first reading, it may be identified with it.