Only two key factors qualify to differentiate among Dourado's varied works: external structure and stylistic creativity. More persistent are the similarities which interrelate them: an at times dense côr local or local color into which or in front of which Dourado's customarily troubled characters struggle with (in) themselves, sometimes successfully, most of the time not, to make their lives bearable. (Fun, per se, would be entirely out of the question in the serious, even somber context of Dourado's fictional world.) This pattern may vary from melodrama to tragedy in the classical sense, but it is always introspective, always personal to the point of intimate, always defensive bordering on paranoid. Negativeness is often confused with (Waldomiro Freitas) Autran Dourado 1926– Copyright Ednalva Tavaresfatality, pathos with fear, and sex with love. There is little collective spirit (except in a background context); instead, one senses a universal separateness in which...