In Brazil, the average citizen spends his entire adult life without reading a single work of fiction. This cannot be normal, except in a culturally dead society. It is safe to say that no Brazilian writer today has the slightest influence on society, despite what the names of some streets and monuments might suggest. There is not a single literary work whose characters or moral lessons are present in the collective imagination, and so the most astonishing fact about Brazil today is that it has no cultural base to serve as a foundation and common heritage. It is not just an educational tragedy, but a human one.