de QUEIROZ, Dinah Silveira 1911-1982

PERSONAL: Born November 9, 1911, in São Paulo, Brazil; died November 27, 1982, in São Paulo, Brazil; daughter of Alarico Silveira (a government official); married Marcelo de Queiroz (a judge), 1929.

CAREER: Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Alcântara Machado award, São Paulo Academy of Letters, 1940, for Floradas na Serra; Latin American literary contest winner, Made-moiselle magazine, for short story "Pecado"; Afonso Arinos award, Brazilian Academy of Letters, for As noites do morro do encanto.

WRITINGS:

fiction; for adults

Floradas na serra (title means "Blossomings on the Hill"), J. Olympio (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1939.

A sereia verde (title means "The Green Mermaid"), J. Olympio (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1941.

Margarida la Rocque: A ilha dos demônios (title means "Margarida la Rocque: The Isle of Demons"), J. Olympio (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1949.

A muralha, J. Olympio (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1954, translation by Roberta King published as The Women of Brazil, Vantage Press (New York, NY), 1980.

Eles herdarão a terra (title means "They Will Inherit the Earth"), Editôra Civilizaĉão Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1960.

Os invasores (title means "The Invaders"), Gráfica Récord Editôra (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1965.

Verão dos infiéis (title means "Summer of the Unfaithful"), José Olympio (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1968.

Comba Malina, Laudes (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1969.

Guida, caríssima Guida (title means "Guida, Dearest Guida"), Livraria J. Olympio Editora (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1981.

for children

As aventuras do homem vegetal (title means "The Adventures of the Vegetable Man"), 1951.

A princesa dos escravos (children's book; title means "Princess of the Slaves"), Gráfica Record Editôra (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1966.

A baía da espuma e outras histórias, 1979.

other

As noites do morro do encanto (title means "The Nights of the Enchanted Hill"), 1957.

Café da Manhã (essays; title means "Morning Coffee"), Olivé Editor (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 1969.

Eu venho: memorial do Cristo, Volume 1, 1974, Volume 2, 1977, translated by Isabel do Prado as Christ's Memorial, 1978.

Os dez melhores contos de Dinah, 1981.

Author of plays, including O Oitavo Dia (title means "The Eighth Day"), 1956. Translator works, including The Cruise of the Raider Wolf, by Roy Alexander, 1940; Disputed Passage by Lloyd C. Douglas, 1941; Quietly My Captain Waits by Evelyn Eaton, 1942; Sense and Sensibility Jane Austen, 1944; Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, 1951. Work included in anthologies Modern Brazilian Short Stories, 1967; The Eye of the Heart, edited by Barbara Howes, 1973; and Other Fires: Short Fiction by Latin-American Women, 1986.

De Queiroz's works have been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and other languages.

ADAPTATIONS: Floradas na Serra was adapted into a film, 1955, serialized for the radio and in comic strips, and appeared as a twenty-two-episode series for São Paulo's TV Cultura, 1982; A muralha was serialized on radio, published in the form of comic strips, and adapted as a television series in 1969.

SIDELIGHTS: Brazilian writer Dinah Silveira de Queiroz published short stories, biographies, plays, and scholarly works, but she is best known as a novelist. She was also the second woman to be elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. According to Dário M. De Castro Alves in Latin-American Writers, "It was in this genre that she became a consummate artist of the written word, achieving a superlative style in the Portuguese language, of whose variety, richness, and profundity she had absolute command, employing it with meticulous correctness and great clarity." Perhaps de Queiroz's best known work is Margarida la Rocque: A ilha dos demônios, published in 1949. The book tells a story "that shows the depths of misery and degradation into which a human being can be hurled by jealousy and loneliness," observed Renard Pérez in Escritores Brasileiros Contemporâneos. Ivan Junqueira, reviewing the work in O Globo, stated that the novel displays "unexcelled mastery, thus achieving that chiaroscuro quality, that shifting interplay of light and darkness indispensable to the fusing of the real and the unreal, the ordinary and the fantastic, the pagan and the Christian into a unique, seamless fiction mosaic."

In 1954, de Queiroz published another popular work, A muralha, which was later translated by Roberta King and published as The Women of Brazil. The book is a historical epic set in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Adonias Filho wrote in Modernos Ficcionistas Brasileiros that de Queiroz "recreates the landscape and the customs of the time, the paulista family as vigorous stock, the men's struggles in the jungle, [and] the fighting over the gold the virgin land did not hide." Filho added, "Within this circle of violence, despair, heroism, and betrayal, the drama in its more romantic-styled way unfolds, powerful and human, as the novelist weaves into her tale the history of her native land." The 1968 novel Verão dos infiéis concerns a family's search for their missing father in Rio de Janiero. Fábio Lucas, reviewing the book in the Correio Braziliense, remarked that Verão dos infiéis is a "dense, and modern work, in which the fate of the characters is played out at the whim of certain fixations of the contemporary world: sex, politics, gratuitousness, and solitude." Lucas concluded that "this book has unquestionably secured for itself a major place in the writer's oeuvre."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Encyclopedia of Latin-American History and Culture, 5 Volumes, Macmillan Library Reference (New York, NY), 1996-98.

Pérez, Renard, Escritores Brasileiros Contemporâneos, [Rio de Janeiro, Brazil], 1960.

Filho, Adonias, Modernos Ficcionistas Brasileiros, [Rio de Janeiro, Brazil], 1958.

Latin American Writers, Volume 3, Charles Scribner's Sons (New York, NY), 1989.

periodicals

Correio Braziliense, February, 1970, Fábio Lucas, review of Verão dos infiéis.

O Globo (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), March 26, 1978, Ivan Junqueira, review of "Margarida la Rocque."*