There is something truly brilliant in the way Gilberto Freyre constructs his works. At first, the unclassifiable character of all of them is impressive, that is, the character of a mixture, of works devoted to many, and not only to one science. From the preface, one can already notice an impressive heap of contrasting references, which instigates curiosity about how they will harmonize in the following pages. Then Gilberto Freyre begins his prose, interweaving anthropology and sociology, synthesis and reports, passing from an inventory of customs to historical events, penetrating into the innermost recesses of his characters, and all this pile up slowly forms a complex and vividly colored picture that hardly a purely sociological, anthropological or historiographical work would be able to match. It is as if he methodically changes the shade of the paint after painting several paragraphs with a single color. After many pages, when it is already possible to observe the whole, we feel before a work with historiographical precision, but painted with literary subtlety in the construction of the characters, in the minuteness of details, in the representation of the sociocultural environments that served as background for the historical period approached. It is clear that his works, constructed in this way, cannot please those who are crazy about the objectivity of facts—but these, knowing them, will never be able to interpret them.
There Is Something Truly Brilliant About Gilberto Freyre
