Customer Reviews

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (""The Devil in the Street, In the Middle of the Whirlwind'')

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This is maybe the best book I have ever read and certainly the one which I discussed the most with other people who have read it.

In this book Riobaldo, a man who has long been a bandit travelling the interior or Brazil, tells the story of his life and love to an unknown listener. In first instance he seems to be a simple man, but this impression is deceiving. Behind it is the story of a man struggling with the Big Issues of life: the devil, life, love, friendship and trust. This is set against the gorguous background of this part of Brazil.

The language used in the book is not easy: the author uses the spoken language, which means repetitions and innovative new words and the book is one big monologue. But please, read on, because once the book has gripped you, it will not let you go. And you are in for a big surprise at the end...

Guimarães Rosa is a kind of brazilian James Joyce. The linguistic inovations and the marvelous saga of a simple/complex man called Riobaldo, makes this novel one of most important books of XX century. Like Fausto and other famous characters of world literature, Riobaldo is a man in doubt about life, love, God and Devil, death, friendship, always looking for the answers in the nature of the interior of Brazil. The book is a mixture of epic, drama, war and the language shows what Guimarães Rosa was in life: a researcher of portuguese language and a studious of the human nature.

This book changed my life. It's all about life and death, good and evil. A tale about growing up in the worst of conditions, of learning about what is right and wrong. Choosing between what was given to him and what he knew was right. Sometimes people don't get it right the first time around but have the courage to continue on and keep trying. I'm a sucker for epic adventures, and this is one of the best. You can learn more about Brasil from this book than from the rest of them combined.

This is not a book to explain.
It is a book to feel and experience.

Rich and complex in it's storyline, characters and linquistics, set against the background of beautiful Brazil, it will stay with you after completing it.
I wish never to part from it.
Don't let the style the author uses throw you off, if you have never encountered it before. Once accostumed to it, you will love it. It has much to give, you need only to receive.

Grande Sertao, or Gran Serton en Espanol, is one of the great, and almost forgotten works of the 20th century, in a similar category with Paradiso, by Lezama Lima. It is a wild, untamed, explosive piece of writing, hard to compare with anything else, as it springs from the soil of the northeast, where things are different. This work is very much a creature of its environment. I especially remember being transfixed by one of the characters, Diadorim, an amazing creation of the life force which Guimaraes brings to life with mercurial power.

When I was younger and had more brain cells, I read parts of the Spanish translation, never the original Portuguese. Unfortunately, the English translation leaves a lot to be desired. Even the title itslef "the Devil to pay" instead of "Hell to pay" is a big mistake. The rest is equally archaic and stiff, as though it had been translated by an aging high school english teacher. The translator also fails to capture to local dialects or slang and opts instead for British sounding idioms. Gadzooks! And what a sadly missed opportunity. The Spanish version captures some of the electricity of the original Brazilian-Portugueseas.

The translation is like looking at the Bayeux Tapestries from behind, a vague outline being all that is visible. Still, it is better than nothing. This work is a genuine masterpiece and is still a powerful and valuable experience.

The "sertão" of the title designates the outback, the backlands, the bush. In the book it is the hinterland which is east-central Brazil ("veredas" are the palm-lined streams that bubble up from the wetter part of this region); more generally it is a mythic land where neither "king nor law" ("sem rei nem lei") curtail liberty. It is the territory of the "jagunços": mounted mercenaries in the pay of landowners or politicians, or just plain bandits, that roamed the sertão in the decades before and after the beginning of the last century.

In Guimarães Rosa's book, Riobaldo, a retired and aging jagunço chief with some education, relates his unsettled, violent and anguished life to an unidentified "doutor", a man of education and social standing we can suppose is the author. The book's great triumph is to convince the reader that he is not only seeing the world though Riobaldo's eyes but also accompanying the jagunço's often agonized thought processes. The key to this success is twofold. On the one hand, Rosa uses for Riobaldo's narration a rich dialect of Portuguese purporting to be that spoken by inhabitants of the sertão. (It is not clear to the average Brazilian reader to what extent this dialect is invented or not!) On the other, Rosa's descriptions of people, events and places are so meticulous and idiosyncratic that it is difficult to imagine that they are wholly fictional. One is forced to wonder to what extent the story was made up by the author and to what extent it is a record of actual events related by a participant. The truth, presumably, is that it is a mixture of the two.

Besides dealing with warring factions of jagunços, motivated by support for regional political leaders, exploitation of the sertão's inhabitants, group loyalty and, ultimately, a desire for vengeance, the book is the story of Riobaldo's complex platonic love affair with his childhood friend and comrade-in-arms Reinaldo/Diadorim.

With its idealization of untamed rugged backlands, its portrayal of a rigid, violent anti-authoritarian sub-culture, its central theme of a transgressive love affair, and its obsession with the wiles of the Devil, "Grande Sertão" is Brazilian to the core. Although a reader requires a very good knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese to read it in the original, the book is justifiably a classic.

This rare gem is quite a find, and while it's an imperfect translation of Grande Sertão: Veredas, it's all the English reader has for now. I am currently conducting an investigation into the nearly fifty-year absence of João Guimarães Rosa in the English-speaking world, and you can read all about it at [...] where I publish my findings, as well as conversations with scholars, artists and experts from all over the world regarding the work João Guimarães Rosa.