«Both his and mine»: Fernando’s character and the Araguaia guerrilla movement in Azul-Corvo by Adriana Lisboa

Abstract

Published in 2010, Adriana Lisboa’s novel Azul-Corvo is characterized by a relatively complex structure: the main story, in which Vanja, a young orphan girl, moves from Rio de Janeiro to Denver in search of her father, is intermingled with several analeptic narrative passages. One of them deals with the participation of Fernando, Suzana’s (Vanja’s deceased mother) ex-husband, in the Araguaia guerrilla movement. While admitting that the main story is about Vanja, and agreeing with the theses of several academics that the theme of the novel is uprooting and the search for a form of belonging that goes beyond the national and territorial, this work focuses on the figure of the deuteragonist, Fernando. Based on the theory of character figuration (Reis, 2015), the poetics of the historical novel (Fernández Prieto, 1998) and the theory of the novel of the recent past (Kingstone, 2017), this work dwells on the configuration of the deuteragonist to show how the figure of Fernando (among others) proceeds from the re-elaboration of a historiographical hypotext, Operação Araguaia (Morais; Silva, 2011) and, furthermore, how the identity construction of the adolescent Vanja takes advantage of the transmission of Fernando’s historical account.