ABSTRACT
The novel Anatomia do Paraíso (‘Anatomy of Paradise’, 2015) by Brazilian author Beatriz Bracher focuses on Felix, a postgraduate student in the celebrated area of Copacabana who is working on Paradise Lost as his research topic. In soaring temperatures, he struggles to comprehend the physical nature of Sin, leaving him feeling literally and figuratively in Hell. His efforts to reach a full understanding of Milton’s epic are then hampered by an epileptic seizure, which renders him temporarily blind. It is at this point that Felix’s role as protagonist is supplanted by Vanda and her younger sister, Maria Joana (‘Jojo’); the reader begins to see Milton through a female gaze as Felix now relies on the young Jojo to read the poem aloud to him. Listening to the poem powerfully transforms his experience of the poetry; with her voice to guide him he is led from Hell to Paradise. However, Jojo finds encoded in the poem a message of female submission and compliance and turns away from the poem towards contemporary poetry, while Vanda herself breaks free from societal constraints and overturns Felix’s reductive attitude to women. Renata Meints Adail’s reading of this novel traces how, against the backdrop of a patriarchal society, the everyday lives of these three main characters become interwoven with the life of Milton and the text of his epic. A vertiginous and dramatic narrative unfolds, drawing in some of the main thematic preoccupations of Paradise Lost – sex, violence, sin, guilt, betrayal, death, and redemption – and offering the informed reader a deepened understanding of these characters’ lives.
