(translated as the
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) is arguably the greatest novel in Portuguese in the 20th century and one of the greatest from Latin America. João Guimarães Rosa had initially planned the story told by Riobaldo as another novella to be included in the monumental collection he called
Corpo de Baile, a mammoth collection of seven 100-page stories, which has been published in three separate volumes since 1964 (
Manuelzão e Miguilim,
Noites do Sertão, and
No Urubuquaquá, no Pinhém). However, as Guimarães Rosa explained in a letter to his friend and fellow diplomat Ribeiro Couto on April 24, 1954, the draft of what was meant to be the seventh of the collection “rebelled” against its author and grew into a complex but seamless web of…
779 words
Citation: Moreira, Paulo. "Grande Sertão: Veredas". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 August 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=32183, accessed 21 November 2024.]
