Carvalho’s narratives are frequently woven out of diary entries and letters, drawing attention to the process of writing the self. The third is the self-conscious textual performance of identity in the context of a highly mediated information age. The characters in his novels and the novels themselves make causal connections across geographical and temporal boundaries that seem to resist the sense of dissolution and dislocation produced by the vertiginous global scope of the plots themselves. The second is his frequent recourse to the trope and narrative structure of paranoia. Most of his novels take place either outside of Brazil or are focalized through an “external” foreign gaze on the country, and are highly self-conscious about the increasing limitations of “Othering” discourses of the colonial era, such as orientalism. 1 The first is the simultaneous deployment and frustration of orientalist narratives. This is never more evident than in his treatment of the theme of travel, especially travel to the “Orient.” The growing body of fiction he has produced since his debut in 1993 is characterized by three tendencies, all interconnected by the bonds of paradox. Bernardo Carvalho’s novels frequently revolve around paradoxes.
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