Beneath the Waters — Oswaldo Franca Jr.

There were stories and stories beneath the waters, love and hate, tenderness and greed. This dazzlingly original novel gives them to us for safekeeping -- the life and the people of a place that is no more.
 
All the places where those people lived are now submerged forever in silence and darkness at the bottom of a lake. There was the seamstress Dona Zulmira, whose husband had to be watched like a hawk lest he wander naked from the house; the rancher Rodolfo, who could not stay away from his neighbor's wife; Eugenio, the mama's boy with an unexpected head for business; the little girl Elisa, who plucked the feathers from her father's singing bird, but couldn't say why; the young husband Paulo Roberto, whose childhood interest in girls was branded on his flesh in the form of two deep scars; the schoolteacher Dona Laisa who interrupted her own bridal procession to discipline her students; the hotel owner Adolfo whose affair with a prostitute ended when she drank some poison just before making love to him for the last time, and so many others.

“A uniquely original novelist, incomparable among us, the most Brazilian of us all.” -- Jorge Amado, author of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands