Vastlands: The Crossing
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Vastlands: The Crossing
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Narrated by:
'Dramatic, wildly colourful and continuously interesting' NEW YORK TIMES
'A veritable linguistic tour de force' MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
In 1956, Brazilian author João Guimarães Rosa published what would become his magnum opus, Grande Sertao: Veredas. South American literary critics were astounded by this ground-breaking ode to the backlands of Brazil, declaring it the Brazilian Ulysses. Guimarães Rosa’s astounding work would take the Latin American literary world by storm.
Originally translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands in 1963, Vastlands is a single sweeping retrospective monologue from the point of view of Riobaldo, a former jagunço – a mercenary or bandit – recounting his life in the backlands of inland Brazil. Raised in poverty by a single mother, Riobaldo receives a basic education before forging his own path within the deeply embedded machismo of the backlands, buoyed by his incredible military abilities and sheer tenacity. His story is a twisting narrative of fraught longing and the flux of power in a lawless state, of old feuds and new betrayals, exiles, Faustian pacts and precarious hierarchy.
Now, over sixty years since its only English translation and seventy years since its initial publication in Portuguese, multi-award-winning literary translator Alison Entrekin renders Guimarães Rosa’s feat of linguistic engineering in kaleidoscopic prose, offering the key to this beloved yet often-overlooked masterpiece to a new generation of readers.
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Critic reviews
One of Brazil’s greatest novelists
A veritable linguistic tour de force. One of the most formally accomplished works of the century (MARIO VARGAS LLOSA, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
A literary work of rare dimension . . . One of the greatest books ever written. Brutal, tender, hearty, wild, vast just like Brazil itself (JORGE AMADO, author of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands)
One of the great novels of the last century. With its complex vision of life and fate, with its garrulous and wily narrator, it exudes a vast and engrossing narrative energy (COLM TÓIBÍN, author of Brooklyn)
The most audacious and well-realised experimental novels to come out of twentieth-century Brazil (CAETANO W. GALINDO)
A magnificent achievement (Alexander Coleman)
All the audacity of the construction, all the richness of the philosophical content would be mere games of intelligence if Guimarães Rosa’s sertão were not also, besides a symbol, a living and concrete reality, with its animals, plants, people, and superstitions admirably described (PAULO RÓNAI)
An extraordinary masterpiece . . . Within it everything is strong, beautiful, impeccably realised (ANTONIO CANDIDO, winner of the Alfonso Reyes International Prize)
As an account of guerrilla warfare, wilderness journeys, assorted atrocities, lust, hate, vengeance and killing, it is dramatic, wildly colourful and continuously interesting (Orville Prescott)
He has given Portuguese a new flexibility, which enables him to find effective literary expression for insights and experiences beyond the reach of conventional prose (William L. Grossman)
A pure delight (MÚCIO LEÃO, former president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters)
Guimarães Rosa is a renevator of language (JOSUÉ MONTELLO, former president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters)
A recognised masterpiece of Brazilian literature and a classic of twentieth-century fiction (LUCIANA STEGAGNO PICCHIO)
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