Nearly twenty years after its first edition, writer Jaime Prado Gouvêa re-releases THE ALTAR OF THE MOUNTAINS OF MINAS. A native of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Jaime Prado Gouvêa drew inspiration from his own journey to write his first novel, set during the military dictatorship, one of the darkest periods in Brazilian history. The bohemian life of Minas Gerais, the repression, and the tense atmosphere of newsrooms are part of the daily life of the character Dirceu Dumont. A man who embodies the tragedy of an entire generation, who were unable to see their dreams come true. Or, in order to survive, he needed to adapt them to more real, more modest ones. Throughout, as an experienced, precise, and confident writer, Jaime plays with what could be ridiculous (Dirceu's encounter with Elisa), melodramatic (the car accident), pornographic (Elisa washing Dirceu's cast), artificial (Cobra demanding Dirceu's apartment), and transforms this material into something that, because of its poignancy and virility, never rings false. "In the first pages of the novel, my character feels his way into writing a novel and begins with the idea of creating another character who also intends to write a novel. Of course, that character is me," the author confesses. Here, Prado Gouvêa narrates Dirceu's encounter with Elisa. A moment that could have been just another beautiful love story, but which turns into tragedy after a car accident. Written in a language, without exaggeration, nothing less than impeccable, with a very solid structure, THE ALTAR OF THE MOUNTS OF MINAS is, as Caio Fernando Abreu says on the blurb of the original edition, “violent as a punch, sharp as a razor blade”.
