Perhaps the most intricate problem facing Brazilian novelists is whether or not to portray colloquial language. Assuming this necessity, there is the very complicated problem of measurement, for which there seems to be no sure solution. That is to say: the gulf between the Portuguese spoken in Brazil and the cultured language is so immense, but so immense, that there is no possible conciliation, but rather tolerable, or perhaps necessary betrayals, which are interspersed in the chosen model. Cultured language, compared to colloquial language, is artificiality and ridicule in Brazilian Portuguese. Colloquial language, on the other hand, does not fit into formal Portuguese except as an infinite set of spelling, prosodic and syntactic errors, which, if portrayed faithfully, make the language almost unrecognizable. How, then, to solve it? The novelist, if he really sees the situation he is narrating, will naturally feel restrained from putting into the mouth of a character a speech that is inconceivable to him. At the same time, he is a novelist, not a speaker; he therefore handles—and hopefully loves—the written language and tradition. From all this, there is only one certainty: the easiest thing is not to be a novelist in Brazil.