Dourado has been likened to Faulkner and this comparison helps to give the English-language reader some idea of his work, although it must be qualified by emphasizing the distinctly Latin, indeed Iberian, nature of Dourado's imagination. Like Faulkner, Dourado is not a novelist of contemporary city life … but of small-town and rural life in the provinces, specifically the upland state of Minas Gerais where he comes from. Minas Gerais is to Dourado what Mississippi was to Faulkner, and out of his home state Dourado has created an equivalent of Yoknapatawpha. If Dourado's work is regional, it is regional in the same way that Faulkner's is: he is a poetic and symbolist novelist who transforms the particulars of the everyday world into the universals of myth and tragedy.

In The Voices of the Dead Dourado examines the fate of a wealthy, landowning family over three generations, especially its last...