Mester

This essay examines four elements of the Amilcar Bettega Barbosa's "Círculo Vicioso" and Marcelino Freire's "Esquece" that distance them from the realistic prose prevalent in the crime fiction of the turn of the millennium, which in turn point to the idea that present-day urban violence is in fact a legacy of the past: Barbosa’s use of circular time as an element that connects the past and the present; Barbosa’s representation of violence against women across time periods, demonstrating the persistence of patriarchy; Freire’s symbolic use of means of transportation in order to connect contemporary crime to slavery; and the oscillation between the roles of victim and perpetrator in Freire’s story, which links contemporary urban crime to an inherited system of exploitation and exclusion.