Word: guimar
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...THIRD BANK OF THE RIVER AND OTHER STORIES by Joāo Guimarāes Rosa. 238 pages. Knopf...
...four years after he was judged an "immortal" worthy of being seated by the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Joāo Guimarāes Rosa donned the official gold-braided uniform and formally took his chair. Publicly, he explained the delay by saying he had been too busy to write his acceptance speech. Privately, he feared that becoming an "immortal" was an unnecessary challenge to his own mortality. Seventy-two hours after the ceremony, his seven-year-old niece went into his study to offer him some popcorn and found him dead of a heart attack...
...Heartland. Not many men have lived as fully and as widely as Guimarāes Rosa did in his 59 years. Born in the feral heartland state of Minas Gerais, he was a physician, veterinarian, herbist, linguist, diplomat and government official in charge of border affairs. Writing fiction was just another way of annexing experience, and he occupied his territory thoroughly and imaginatively. His novel Grande Sertào: Veredas, published in the U.S. in 1963 as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, is encyclopedic in its embrace of Minas Gerais ecology. Yet it is as exciting...
...same is true of Sagarana (U.S. edition: 1966), a cycle of stories in which Guimarāes Rosa's Joycean prose turns the folklore and rough-and-tumble of backwoods life into a fresh order of experience. Unfortunately, much of the wordplay, coinages, dialect and rhythms are lost in the passage from Portuguese to English...
Doing Nothing. The style of many regionalist writers generates inward pressures that condense the atmosphere of a time and place - for example, the palpable Dixie gothic of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Guimarāes Rosa's style is centrifugal. Shooting out to ignite the familiar details of the author's vigorous humanism, it transcends particulars and turns events into allegory. In The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories,* many of the particulars dissolve, leaving the author's metaphysical core standing alone. It is as Guimarāes Rosa intended. The book is his Tempest...