Word: amado
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shepherds of the Night does not quite reach the superb level of such earlier Amado classics as The Violent Land or Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, but it ripples with the special inner music that has made Amado's work popular the world over. Like all Amado's novels, this one is filled with the coppery women of Bahia and the men who chase them through nights of song and stars. They can all say with Amado, "What I tell I know because I lived it, not because I heard it told...
SHEPHERDS OF THE NIGHT by Jorge Amado. 364 pages. Knopf...
...Open the jug of rum and give me a swallow to clear my throat." That is the way tales are begun in northeastern Brazil. And when the storyteller is Jorge Amado, it is well to take another swallow and settle back for an epic journey into passion, music, gambling, a bit of fighting and all manner of discursive side trips; Amado holds that there is "nothing worse than telling a story hurry-scurry, slipshod, without carefully analyzing everything...
...this new novel, his fifth to be issued in the U.S., Amado, 54, tells tall tales of Bahia, the great, sun-drenched seaport that the Brazilian government calls Salvador. The first of his three themes deals with the astonishing marriage of Corporal Martim-a cardsharp and famed capoeria* fighter-to Marialva, who is as beautiful as a saint in a procession but as dark and devious as Lilith. This story soon blends with one about Negro Massu and the christening of his blue-eyed son. There are problems here, since Ogun, the Voodoo god of iron, has been named godfather...
...Amado reads his characters in depth. There is no facile division into good guys and bad guys, and everyone's motives are mixed. The lawyer, Virgilio, who helps Horacio outwit the Badarós, also seduces Horacio's pretty wife. And spade-bearded Sinhó Badaró, who has arranged the killing of many men, still agonizes over each decision-in fact, his soul searching destroys the efficiency of his best gunman, Negro Damião. As in U.S. westerns, the land is the real hero, breeding men as luxuriant, lavish and cruel as itself. Presumably spurred...