Backlands Read Online Free Page A

savage and abundant, treacherous and protective, deadly and life giving. In Brazil, da Cunha’s book is the precursor to a whole genre of writing on the sertão with a broad influence, from the regionalist literature by the modernists to the work of Gilberto Freyre and the intellectual Darcy Ribeiro to the masterful post-modernist novel Grande sertão: Veredas (1956), by João Guimarães Rosa, known in English (in J. L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís’s translation) as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands , through which da Cunha’s ghost invisibly roams.
    Da Cunha’s baroque style, as contradictory as the author himself, mimics the rough topography of the backlands, as well as its palette. His imagery is colored with the earth tones of the desert, the blood reds of its sunsets, the blacks of the mudholes, and the grays of its rock formations. His terminology comes from a wide spectrum of fields, including geology, geography, botany, biology, ethnology, anthropology, meteorology, and climatology. He might be said to have been an ecologist and environmentalist before his time, and one who gave a symphonic voice to the land. In fact, the figure of Conselheiro is described in a geological metaphor: He is an “anticline” that has been “cast up” by “deep-lying layers of ethnic stratification.”
    All of which makes da Cunha’s writing sensuous. Alfredo Bosi, in his introduction to a didactic edition of the book that appeared in 1973, remarks how the narrative diction is structured according to the classical precepts of rhetoric: intensification and antinomy. Da Cunha abuses superlatives and antitheses. Alongside passages of intense poetic quality sit rugged, unsentimental segments by a war correspondent whose mission is to impress his reader with the immediacy of the conflict, which he perceives to be an unprecedented travesty. Like the works of Machado de Assis, with whom da Cunha has been compared, Os sertões often addresses the reader in the first person, offering asides, personal opinion, and sarcastic commentary on the events and personalities.
    Not surprisingly, the book has, at times, been described as a novel. This is an offense to a war correspondent whose passion for truth was undeterred. But it might also be understood as a celebration of fiction—especially in Latin America—in its capacity to change reality. Os sertões has itself inspired a number of novels, among them, my favorite, La guerra del fin del mundo ( The War of the End of the World , 1981), by Mario Vargas Llosa, thanks to which a new generation of readers rediscovered da Cunha’s masterwork at the end of the twentieth century; A casca da serpente ( The Serpent’s Skin , 1989), by José J. Veiga; As meninas do Belo Monte ( The Meninas of Belo Monte , 1992), by Júlio José Chiavenato; and Canudos (1997), by Ayrton Marcondes.
    Plus, there is a cinematic quality to the entire thing. Like a moving camera’s eye, the narrative point of view shifts from wide-angle panoramic shots of the landscape to intense, almost unbearable close-ups of the human suffering wrought by the war. The structure of the book exhibits features of good screen writing, from the setup to the breakpoint and then the slow, agonizing denouement. In fact, the pace and length of the book, with its retelling of the same story from different perspectives and time frames, with its replay of key events and the agonizingly lengthy description of the last days of the campaign, forces the reader to suffer through the battle along with the protagonists. A rather mediocre 1997 movie version, produced by Mariza Leão, was one of the biggest productions in the history of Brazilian film.
    But while Os sertões can be read as a novel, and many readers describe its gripping effect on them, it is surely not a novel. The portrait da Cunha offers us of Conselheiro is, arguably, the most daring aspect of Os sertões. The leader’s brilliance and criminality are juxtaposed. He and his habitat