In The Land, Antônio Torres tells a universal story of tragic homecoming in a style that owes much to the popular cultural forms of his birthplace in Brazil's notoriously poor Backlands (Sertão).
He uses snatches of song and prayer, rhyming jokes and fantasies, and the literatura de cordel (rope literature) - broadsheets telling of juicy local gossip, murders, laments, ghostly apparitions, sold in the marketplace hanging on strings of twine. All this tells the story of Nelo, who escapes from the empty drought-ridden farmland to Brazil's teeming cities, only to return home shattering everyone's dreams.
First published to acclaim in 1976 as the erratic military censorship was on the wane, The Land now ranks in Brazil as a modern classic, available in English only from Readers International.
ANTÔNIO TORRES was born in 1940 in Junco (today called Sátiro Dias), a small farming village in Brazil's notoriously poor Sertão (Backlands) in the north-eastern state of Bahia. Like his characters from Bahia in The Land and Blues for a Lost Childhood, he attended school in Alagoinhas, then in Salvador. From school Antônio Torres joined the Jornal da Bahia in Salvador as a cub reporter following crime stories; then he moved to São Paulo, where he worked as a sport and local reporter for Ultima Hora. From 1965, shortly after the coup d'état that brought the military to power in Brazil (1964-1985), he moved to Portugal for 3 years to 1968, when he returned to Brazil and left journalism for advertising and fiction writing, living and working in Rio. He is now one of the best known Brazilian authors, since 2013 chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
ANTÔNIO TORRES was born in 1940 in Junco (today called Sátiro Dias), a small farming village in Brazil's notoriously poor Sertão (Backlands) in the north-eastern state of Bahia, which The Land brings to life. Like his character Nelo in the novel, he attended school in Alagoinhas, then in Salvador. From school Antônio Torres joined the Jornal da Bahia in Salvador as a cub reporter following crime stories; then he moved to São Paulo, where he worked as a sport and local reporter for Ultima Hora. From 1965, shortly after the coup d'état that brought the military to power in Brazil (1964-1985), he moved to Portugal for 3 years to 1968, when he returned to Brazil and left journalism for advertising and fiction writing, living and working in Rio. He is now one of the best known Brazilian authors, since 2013 chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
