I think it’s very sad to see the status which Clarice has gained among foreigners (Americans, that is) as the 'best Brazilian novelist' of the past century. She is not. No one in Brazil thinks so, and it's been only in recent years that foreigners have elevated her work to a status which it doesn't really deserve - they deny it to Os Sertões and Claro Enigma -, mainly because of political reasons and because it’s easy to turn her into a feminist icon. They couldn't do that with the old, Catholic Cecília, a great poet, and much less with Adélia Prado, so they had to choose Clarice instead. And it doesn’t stop with her: now Brazilians are doing the very same thing with that laughably untalented carioca junkie from the 80's whose name does not deserved to be mentioned. Very soon she's going to be translated and looked at as 'the best Brazilian poet of the second half of the 20th-century' (after Chico Buarque, of course). It's ridiculous. And they’ve been doing the same to Hilda Hilst too, although, like Clarice, she at least had some talent. What's next? Gregório Duvivier? Somebody kill me before it happens!