You could round your mouth and blow truths, either way, I would not trust

Narrative unreliability in Oz, by Mafalda Ivo Cruz

Abstract

Author of powerful and little-treated work, the Portuguese Mafalda Ivo Cruz has a writing often considered hermetic due to its fragmentation, non-linearity and diversity of voices, often presented in a chaotic way and associated with a spatiotemporal rupture. In Oz (2006), these characteristics are at the service of a narrative that deals with the arrest of an artist – Oz – for the sexual abuse of his neighbor. The justice of incarceration calls into question, and the narrative is based on that doubt. To do so, Cruz uses a text composed of different perspectives and narrative voices, so that the faults of a character’s memory and the missing points are filled by others, forming a cohesive whole. However, it does not necessarily mean clarity, on the contrary: we have to try, alone, to organize the chaos we are placed in. Resolving the motto of the narrative thus, ends up surpassing the simple discovery of the culprit, mainly because we are guided in this investigation by voices that we do not know are reliable – including, in fact, a possible criminal. As a result, the aesthetic network in which Cruz entangles us ends up proving to be much more important than the resolution of the criminal investigation.