Ditched Dreams

Ditched Dreams is a dazzling novel about workers in a mysterious mine where they must remain for two years without leaving. To escape that suffocating environment, the miners tell tales of frustrated love affairs, revenge, dreams, and witchcraft which are written down and retold by a worker nicknamed Foureyes. The novel is spiced with scatological and picaresque scenes, witchcraft spells and mythological beings, along with science-fiction inventions such as a Pleasurematic. Readers have recognized scenes alluding to classical literary works, biblical passages, adventure novels, old movie serials, and contemporary films. Ditched Dreams is a cavalcade in which down-to-earth Brazilian humor provokes non-stop Rabelaisian laughter as the whip of social criticism. The narrative, essentially oral, includes samples of the vast linguistic mosaic found in Brazilian Portuguese, dexterously adapted into a literary dialect that evokes vernacular English from everywhere and nowhere in particular.