This article proposes an alternative reading of the novel Marco Zero I: a revolução melancólica by Oswald de Andrade as a dialectic between panorama and snapshot that through discontinuous fragments shows the impossibility of building a totalizing image of Brazil. For this, we discuss the reception of the novel and we analyze the “mural form” as an innovative narrative proposal that allows to present the peculiarities of a specific social matter. Our central thesis is that Oswald’s novel, despite being considered a failed work, develops an innovative literary form that allows addressing the social and historical conflicts of the 1930s through a (re) presentation of the popular that avoids its totalization in such a way that both the form and the matter of what is narrated make palpable the ideological and historical fractures of a process of peripheric modernization.