WOMAN BETWEEN MIRRORS <i> by Helena Parente Cunha translated by Fred P. Ellison and Naomi Lindstrom (University of Texas Press: $18.95, cloth; $8.95, paper; 144 pp.) </i>

This Brazilian meditation on feminine identity in novel form belongs to the category of confessional women’s writing that attempts to turn raw experience into art--and it does so with a fair measure of success. The unnamed heroine, who writes in the first person, comes from an upper-class urban family. All the characters in her psychic landscape are locked into recognizable roles, not just male or female but occupying fixed places in the family hierarchy..

The story begins when the heroine is already an adult and has replicated the family roles in her own family. She is perplexed at the rage her grown sons feel against their father and despairs at her inability to restore family balance. When she reflects that she always has unquestioningly considered herself fortunate in her upbringing, the structure crumbles.

Determined to face the source of disharmony, she places herself between two mirrors and grapples with the multiple selves she can thus confront. Much of the novel consists of her dialogue with the characters she gives voice to. It would be too easy, she fears, to let her most belligerent feminist self explain away everything as male oppression. This voice--she refers to her as “the woman who writes me”--would be merely an equal and opposite reflection: lacking in facets, jargon-ridden, much too pat. But the force of the neat explanations is difficult to subdue. In what amounts to a self-psychoanalysis, she discovers that the specificity of her own history--the African-derived mythology and cults of her native Bahia add an exotic dimension to her musings--gives her the weapons necessary to triumph over generalizations and to find her own strength.