Brazilian and Jewish, born in the Ukraine. Precocious student and writer. Married to a diplomat and lived abroad for many years. Stories and novels considered mystical, or modernist, or symbolic, or Kafkaesque. Considered perhaps the greatest woman writer of Portuguese.

The story, “Preciousness” is animated by a hyper-self consciousness of the protagonist, delivered in a highly personal language using a highly personal series of images. Go back to Baudelaire and French Symbolism, where a highly personal language and symbolism is unique to the author, but in which other readers will find something of their own.
In this highly personal language of the story’s protagonist, there are concepts and linguistic elements and experiences that are magnified to immense proportions by the protagonist.
719. The word “vast” is itself a magnification. Is this of her sense of self, of life’s possibilities, or the dream world out of which she tries to awaken?
We have wordplay in “take an hour, give an hour.” And in the hour she is given, there are “daydreams acute as a crime.” The feeling of omnipotence felt by the girl as she summons a bus (and this description becomes a surreal image out of dreams). Omnipotence, self absorption, ego-centrism?
Very identifiably, there is the intense self-consciousness and the awareness of others’ awareness, or potential awareness, of her. The exaggerated fear that someone “might say something to her.”
720. In a sense, the male workers are taken off the hook. But then again, this idea that they “know” is important. What do they know? That she menstruates, has sexual urges, or . . .?
there is a kind of a safe-haven for her in intellectual pursuits—because it is internal, beyond the male gaze? Look at this utterance that “no one dared.” Compare to Akhmatova on 297.
721. Something of her “studies” also not what it seems.
The ambivalent relationship to the maid. “Quick witted.” But then the maid becomes a kind of priestess, after the protagonist also uses a kind of incantation.
722-3. Where there is a kind of climactic scene. She is approached, on her walk to school, by two youths. Then there is an encounter, after which she seems to be even more unsettled. What happens in this encounter? Listen to the way sound fills space. The difference being that you don’t have to point in any directionto hear it (as opposed to sight).
724. Time seems to have become warped. And self-perception. And the questioning of the self becomes much more acute.