The paths of the Sertaw

Author's name: João Guimarães Rosa

"The Paths of the Sertão" is the only novel and timeless literary masterpiece by Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa. Published in 1956, it was a revolution that shook the foundations of the Brazilian literary scene and profoundly changed its features. In it, the author created a new language, presented a different narrative structure, and experimented with a renewed approach to addressing issues of the individual and society.

Guimarães Rosa defined his novel as an "illogical autobiography." The text exploits the Brazilian sertão, with its vast lands and difficult life, where people wander among its paths and twists, to paint an epic in which the fate of the community intertwines with the life of the individual. At the heart of the sertão, "a land the size of the world," is Riobaldo, the hero-narrator, a humble Jagunço who became a large farmer. He recounts his life memories to an anonymous interlocutor, and his personality emerges with its nobility and contradictions, its light and darkness, its divine providence and the devil's temptations, its pain and violence, and the love and human interaction that characterize his soul with all the men and women of the sertão he knew.

The translator

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“A multifaceted novel, dedicated to eternity, as profound and inexhaustible as reality itself.”

Mario Vargas Llosa

“A work of unparalleled scope in literature... one of the greatest ever written. Violent, tender, affectionate, brutal.”

Jorge Amado