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Vastlands: The Crossing
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Description
'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 Brazilian backlands, 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.
Product details
| Published | Jan 19 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 544 |
| ISBN | 9781037201936 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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One of Brazil's greatest novelists
New York Times
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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
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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
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The most audacious and well-realised experimental novels to come out of twentieth-century Brazil
CAETANO W. GALINDO
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A magnificent achievement
Alexander Coleman, New York Times
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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

























