Entering history through literature: Personalism and personification in Fonseca's Agosto

I offer a reading of a set of metonymies that Fonseca uses to portray unsolved political tensions between individualism and the state, mythology and historiography, the people, the subaltern and the multitude.[...] the novel partakes in a tradition that has proven to be very prolific not only in Brazil but also in Argentina and Chile during the past few decades: representing the postdictatorial state through the narration of a detective story. In other words, Fonseca stages the political scenario that not only preceded but also enabled the longest dictatorship in the country's history.[...] he juxtaposes two different postdictatorial moments: the one he is writing about and the one he is writing from. According to Capanema's personalist speech, social order is inseparable not from a contract with the leader's constituency but something that is seemingly a part of his personality: his name.