Before the Green Ball
Antes do Baile Verde (Before the Green Ball) is a Brazilian short story written by Lygia Fagundes Telles and originally published by Editora Bloch in 1970.
Before the Green Ball was distributed under Emílio Garrastazu Médici, during the military dictatorship, and soon after it was published it won the International Women's Grand Prize for Foreign Short Stories.
In addition to this, other short stories by Lygia enabled her to be chosen for chair number sixteen of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, founded by Machado de Assis.
At the same time, Guimarães Rosa wrote Grande Sertão: Veredas, a work that gives voice to the sertanejo and describes, in monologue, the long journey of jagunços through Minas Gerais, Goiás and Bahia.
[5] Another post-modern writer, Clarice Lispector, exposed a recurring structure in her prose that would lead to the production of short stories: a character is in a routine condition and is disturbed by an event; some external element makes her return to normality (epiphany) and, with this, she "discovers" her true identity.
[8] In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas resigned in 1945, after fifteen years in power, and then Eurico Gaspar Dutra won the elections, initiating a developmental policy in the country, on the side of the capitalist bloc.
[13] A new literary vision was further intensified by the counter-revolution, called for by conservative sectors of the Catholic Church, influential politicians, landowners, the industrial bourgeoisie and part of the middle class, by the Armed Forces to remove Goulart from power and establish what would become the military dictatorship, which began with the coup of 1964.
[14][15] As a response to the fierce censorship, marginal poetry and intimate-existentialist prose spread, including Antes do Baile Verde, by Lygia Fagundes Telles.
Two other striking features of Lygia's literature are ambiguity and irony, also present in Ciranda de Pedra (1954) and As Meninas (1973), in which the writer establishes the internal conflicts of a man living in society.
[22] Chronologically, Lygia Fagundes Telles belongs to the modernist generation of 1945, alongside Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector, Rubem Braga and Dalton Trevisan; therefore, there is an influence of stream of consciousness and epiphany, resources used by these writers.
The personalities shown in the texts of Antes do Baile Verde are intimate, psychologically introspective, and strongly individualized, to construct an identity that produces a real effect.
[26] Among the most popular stories in the book, The Objects exposes a conflict between a couple with a frayed relationship, in which the wife shows no interest in the affairs of her husband, who is emotionally unbalanced;[27] Only a Saxophone tells the monologue of a selfish prostitute who never forgets a saxophone player;[28] Before the Green Ball shows the selfishness of a daughter who would rather go to the ball than take care of her sick father; The Hunt expresses a man's fantastic adventure in front of a tapestry;[29] Christmas on the Ferryboat promotes a biblical intertext with the birth of Jesus;[30] and Come See the Sunset narrates a dialogue, in a tone of mystery, between ex-boyfriends who meet in a cemetery at dusk.
The characters, almost always disintegrated/corrupted by stressful family relationships or by society itself, find themselves dealing with memories they wanted to forget, with their fragmented experiences, a past that torments them, a reminiscing that never stops".
[32] The reviewer and critic Paulo Rónai also gave a favorable opinion of the eighteen short stories in Antes do Baile Verde: "these masterpieces, of such deep intimate restlessness and which exude such profound despair, gain the classic serenity of definitive art forms".
[33] Antonio Candido, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo, pointed out that "Lygia has always had the high merit of obtaining, in the novel and the short story, the clarity appropriate to a vision that penetrates and reveals, without resorting to any trickery or heavy-handedness in language or characterization".
