Carlos de Oliveira is a central figure in twentieth-century Portuguese literary history mainly because of his novel Uma abelha na chuva (A Bee in the Rain, 1953). But he is also important because in most of his work he has captured the ambience of stagnation, frustration, oppression, and quiet despair in Portuguese society during the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Oliveira endorses some of the ideological tenets of the neorealism movement; in Uma abelha na chuva he does so through a sharp analysis of the power relations between the lower-middle-class yeomanry in the Gândara region and the defenseless peasants. Oliveira is acknowledged as a writer with a strong sense of place at a regional level, and his novels mirror Portuguese society during the middle of the twentieth century. His work produced during the later phase of his career has generated a widespread interest because...