Joao Guimaraes Rosa · 1956 · overland

Joao Guimaraes Rosa's 1956 novel, translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands and often called the Brazilian Ulysses. An old rancher named Riobaldo talks for three days without a chapter break about his years as a jagunco in the sertao of Minas Gerais - the crossings, the war between bands, a pact he may or may not have made with the devil, and Diadorim.

1. 1
   The Sao Francisco

   On the riverbank a boy meets another boy called Reinaldo, who is fearless and beautiful and about whom Riobaldo will be wrong for the entire book - the crossing where everything in his life is decided before he knows it.

2. 2
   The Urucuia

   My river of love is the Urucuia, he says - the country he claims as his own, cerrado and veredas and buriti palms, and the years of riding with armed bands through it in a war nobody outside can follow.

3. 3
   The Serra das Araras

   Up into the high ground toward the crossing that beat Medeiro Vaz - the whole middle of the book being men on horseback moving through country that Rosa names precisely and describes as though it were weather.

4. 4
   The Liso do Sussuarao

   The waste they try twice to cross: the first attempt turns back with animals dying of thirst and bleeding from the nose, and the second gets over - and getting over it is the act the novel treats as the real one.

5. 5
   O Paredao

   The last battle, where the bands finally meet and Diadorim goes at Hermogenes with a knife - and Riobaldo learns, after it is over and the body is washed, the thing he has failed to understand for six hundred pages.

6. 6
   Curvelo

   An old rancher with land and a wife, talking for three days to a listener who never speaks - and still asking whether the devil exists, and whether crossing the sertao means anything at all. Living is a very dangerous business.