Word: mira
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Bahia revolves--more or less--around the tale of two lovers. Otelia, a beautiful young girl (Mira Fonesca), comes to Bahia, a spectacularly beautiful area on the Brazilian coast, to work in a brothel. There she meets Martim (Antonio Pitanga), a handsome young member of Bahia's cheerfully disreputable fringe element. By the end of the movie, her simple adulation--she is young enough to clutch a rag doll to her--has won him over from the wiles of more sophisticated women. And so the two are married, surrounded by their friends...
...Mira is the central character in this book. She spent her childhood on a leash in her suburban backyard. (At age five, Mira had taken off all her clothes and toddled to the store. Her parents didn't much like the idea of roping her up but didn't think they had much of an alternative.) She is a bright, lonely child who skipped ahead several grades in school and read Nietzsche while her girlfriends giggled over boys. In college Mira comes into her own, speaking her thoughts and expressing her curiousity. The reader resents, as Mira did, the male...
...book is built on two circles of women; first Mira and her housewife friends in the '50s and later, Mira's grad student classmates at Harvard. Though the lifestyles and concerns of these two groups differ radically, both sets of women are forced to acknowledge that in twenty years, little has changed. The first group marries, almost automatically...
...persuasive narrator aid her in this. In addition, she ties the women's experiences to the nation's. Poltical caucuses, not the supermarket, become the meeting place for the women. When the Harvard women gather for coffee, they talk of Vietnam, not laundromats. Some of the characters, like Mira's friend Val, become deeply, almost obsessively involved with the peace movement. Mira becomes serious about attending the meetings only after she meets an attractive man at one.) In addition to the politicized sphere in which the women move is the underlying awareness of violence. Some blood spilled...
...days later, Mira, Val and their friends marched to the Boston Common in a huge protest against the United States invasion of Cambodia. The group returned to Val's and turned on the news, awaiting some recap of the event. They were interrupted by a phone call from Val's daughter Chris, a freshman in college. She had been raped. Violence had come full circle since Mira's night in Kelly...