Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - Brazilians have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of a special book: Newspapers have published reports and articles, academies have organized conferences and debates, news shows have broadcasted stories, museums have offered exhibitions, new editions were printed. This could be routine in other countries, but, unfortunately, reading is not a Brazilian's habit. Shame on us.
The book that Brazilians are celebrating is a singular one. It radically divides opinions. Some readers love it and spend their lives reading it again and again; others can not pass the 50th page. They give up saying that the author's style is too difficult to grasp.
It is a novel, Grande Sertão: Veredas written by a diplomat, Joao Guimaraes Rosa. He spoke eight languages, but chose to write in a peculiar and inventive way. The book has been translated into many languages. Its English title is "The Devil to Pay in the Backlands".
The novel is a tragic love story that ends in an astonishing way. It unites Riobaldo and Diadorim, two gunmen in a raging war against rival bands. The author creates a new language, using unknown words that readers magically understand.
The book sounds like a music born in the Brazilian heart; it reminds us of a rural and savage Brazil, a lost and remote world. It is an epic, a drama, a documentary and an inventory of the exuberant flora and fauna of the Brazilian Savannah (the "Cerrado").
The novel has a local plot entwined with a universal story. It describes the inner desires of a cattleman, and the global dilemmas of the soul's eternal fight against evil, and against the devil himself. That is one of its mysteries: to be so global, and so local.
This Brazilian masterpiece contains so many meaningful and unexpected sentences that even those who have never read it quote them. One of the best known is: "The truth is not in the setting out nor in the arriving: it comes to us in the middle of the journey." It could mean many things. In an information-overloaded world, of real-time, ready-made interpretations, it teaches us the wisdom of seeking the deeper meaning of life in each of its events. The real wisdom is to be able to see the truth as it reveals itself in the course of life's many pathways. I took the quote from the first English translation, now out of print. But a new English translation by Gregory Rabassa is forthcoming, through UK's The Serpent's Tail and USA's New Directions. Take a look.
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