Novel
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Grande Sertão: Veredas
João Guimarães Rosa · 1956
Synopsis
Now an old landowner, the former jagunço Riobaldo tells his life to a visitor from the city, who says nothing. Raised in the house of his godfather after his mother's death, he joins the band of Joca Ramiro, the greatest jagunço chief of the sertão, and becomes attached there to a companion, Reinaldo, whom he will call Diadorim. The murder of Joca Ramiro by Hermógenes, leader of a rival band, launches a war of vengeance. Riobaldo constantly questions himself about God and the devil, and about the pact he may have made with the latter.
Context
The novel appeared in 1956 from José Olympio, after its author's journey to the sertão in 1952, according to Prepara Enem. It forms a single block, without chapters, in an oral language that mixes archaisms, neologisms and regional turns of phrase. The sertão in it can be read as a metaphor for the Brazilian soul. The book was translated into English as early as 1963 and adapted as a miniseries by Globo television in 1985; in 2002, a vote of one hundred writers for the Bokklubben World Library ranked it among the hundred best books of all time.
Who it is for
A very long novel with no divisions, in difficult language; two French translations exist, by Jean-Jacques Villard in 1965 and by Maryvonne Lapouge-Pettorelli in 1990.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the greatest works of Portuguese-language literature, and translated into many languages.
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