Novel Possession: fiction writing in between history and language. Masterclass by Maurício Meirelles de Mello.

4th meeting of the masterclass series at #Goyki3. Novel Possession: fiction writing in between history and language - hosted by Maurício Meirelles de Mello. Our Guest came to us from Brazil to talk about his new book "Possession". He started writing it simultaneously with the election of far-rightist Jair Bolsonaro to preside Brazil from 2019 to 2022. The book examines the circumstances of contemporary life in Brazil and abroad, notably Poland, in the face of the impact caused by political conditions set by authoritarian regimes over individual consciousness and collective memory. The author is interested in investigating the permanency of such events, that happened mainly during the civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985), in present-day Brazil. At the same time, there’s a section of the story that goes on in Poland, and follows the same path to understand how a troubled political past extends itself into the present and how it shapes individual and collective conscience. During the Masterclass, Maurício Meirelles de Mello talked about the challenges this novel imposes to the writer and tried to search answers for including questions like: What are the possibilities and limitations of such a project, both in terms of historic veracity and fictional likelihood? Can one gender of writing be complementary to the other? Or, on the contrary, they collide, since their objectives and languages are different? How fiction, as a literary gender, can “work fictionally” without betraying history? How history, as a narrative compromised to factual aspects that constitute “some reality”, can work within fiction?