Having set several novels in Brasilia, the author of this essay suggests that a fiction representing that city could benefit from its mythic dimension and from other traits discussed here. Brasilia’s image is shaped by myth and by the history of an idea that culminates with its modernistic project. Very few cities in the world have such a strong symbolic power. Brasilia’s history is the history of a utopia built throughout a hundred and fifty years. After the city’s inauguration, this utopia came face to face with the real Brasilia, thus exacerbating the tensions between geometric rationality and creative life, the modern and the old.
Myth and literature; Brasilia; Utopia; Modernistic project