A casa das duas torres, by Bia Barros, is one of those novels that refuses to be read through a single lens. At first, we follow Bibiana, the youngest daughter of Colonel Nogueira’s second family, as she grows up trying to disappear inside a house ruled by fear, secrets, and violence. But it soon becomes clear that A casa das duas torres is not merely a place: it is a structure of power, an inheritance, a machine built to silence bodies and histories.
At the heart of this narrative are women who survive in whatever ways they can. Ismália, who shrinks a little more with each humiliation. Ágata, who finds in herbs, books, and ancient knowledge a way to defy death. Teresa, the Indigenous grandmother who keeps alive the bonds with ancestors and the enchanted beings of the forest. And Bibiana, the invisible girl, who learns to disappear as a form of resistance, until her body can find another way of being present.
One passage, in particular, touched me deeply. Bia Barros asks: “… what do we hide beneath the skin? There is a web of memories crossing our pores. The flesh carries within itself the scars of stories never told” (p. 67). I found myself thinking of the skin as a living archive, a place where stories that could not always be spoken are stored. In the novel, memory does not appear only as recollection; it pulses as scar, as inheritance, as silent transmission. The body keeps what words, whether out of fear, pain, or impossibility, have not yet been able to reach.
The book can be read from the perspective of women struggling to survive in a rigid, brutal, patriarchal world. It can be read politically, as the portrait of an order sustained by power, manipulation, authoritarianism, and fear. It can also be read through the lens of the sacred, where faith tries to find some promise of justice in a reality that has failed so many times.
But I was especially interested in reading it through the lens of masculinities. As a man and a psychologist, it was impossible not to notice the violence of a patriarchal model that does not merely oppress women, but needs to diminish them in order to sustain its own fantasy of greatness. Colonel Nogueira embodies this kind of power: he dominates because he fears collapse; he commands because he cannot bear to be seen in his fragility; he controls because he does not know how to relate without turning bonds into possession.
In this sense, the novel resonates with something bell hooks identified with precision: patriarchy is also a pedagogy of brutality. It teaches men to confuse strength with domination, authority with violence, silence with respect. And the cost of this pedagogy falls, above all, on women: women who shrink, disappear, fall ill, pray, invent, resist.
What interested me most in Bia Barros’s writing is that the fantastic never appears as literary decoration. It rises from the wounds of history itself. When a woman shrinks, when a saint speaks an unknown language, when the dead continue to haunt the house, we are not entering a world too distant from our own. We are encountering a possible language for what often cannot fit into ordinary speech. The novel turns haunting into memory, enchantment into denunciation, imagination into survival. And perhaps that is why the book is so absorbing: because what unsettles us most is not what seems impossible, but what we recognize far too closely.
A Casa das Duas Torres is a novel about memory, the feminine, power, and survival. But it is also about what resists beneath the skin, within the walls of a house, in inherited names, in stories no one ever told properly. Bibiana begins by trying to disappear, like someone who learned too early to mistake invisibility for protection. The novel, however, knows that certain presences do not disappear: they only wait. And when they finally return, they no longer come back as they once were.
To purchase the Kindle edition of the book, visit the link: A Casa das Duas Torres — Bia Barros.
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