MEETING IN OURO PRETO

Award-winning poet and translator Geraldo Holanda Cavalcanti exudes verbal elegance in the short stories of ENCONTROS EM OURO PRETO. These are fantastic texts, set in a suggestive and sinister atmosphere, which provoke strangeness and doubt. In the story that lends the book its title, a man flirts with a woman who may be the same woman who died in a car accident the day before. In "Marciano," a girl named Mariinha turns up pregnant. At first, what could be another case of premature and unwanted pregnancy takes on a mysterious air when the child's paternity is claimed by a man who claims to be a Martian. In the short story "A samambaia," a man can no longer discern the boundary between reality and imagination. Also in "A outra face de Eva," the narrator is unable to identify reality when he encounters a woman identical to his wife. She then becomes his lover. In "Accident," a man is accused of a hit-and-run accident that he doesn't even know actually occurred. The passenger suggests an encounter with the supernatural. The violinist deals with a cursed instrument that hardens the fingers of anyone who dares play Ravel's Tzigane. In Of Angels and Guards, a man, after a lecture on angels and the like, believes he's been followed by someone who could be his guardian angel. The Mysterious Bermuda Triangle is the theme of Horoscopes. Zezita is a short story about a girl who supposedly performs miracles and dreams of levitating. And so the stories in ENCONTROS EM OURO PRETO unfold, always leaving the reader with some suggestive element that constantly threatens to breach the barrier of the inexplicable.