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Seller's Description:
London. 1980. Andre Deutsch. 1st British Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0233972269. Foreword by Jorge Amado. 146 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature Translated Brazil Latin America. FROM THE PUBLISHER-In this epic saga of the human spirit, set in the harsh backlands of Northeastern Brazil, the reader inhabits the unusual mind of Sergeant Getulio, a hired gunman capable of terrible brutality and brilliant primitive philosophy, as he fulfills a mission. His boss's orders: to capture a political enemy and deliver him up for retribution. But as Getulio is returning with his captive, federal troops intercept him and attempt to rescue the prisoner. Getulio, unable or unwilling to understand that he has been betrayed by his own boss, resists them. The only morality he knows is to complete his mission. He is a classic hero, rigid in his integrity, suddenly brought into conflict with an incomprehensibly modern kind of evil. In the end he must choose between his manhood and his life. SERGEANT GETULIO is a taut, tightly crafted novel, vivid and raw and bloody, alternately funny and poignant, but always compelling. When it first appeared in 1971 it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and won the highest literary honor Brazil offers: the Jabuti Prize for the best novel of the year. It has since been published in Portugal and (in translation) in France. ‘Ribeiro's Getâlio is a revelation. This murdering, betrayed thug on a vicious mission becomes before our very eyes a free man whom we must love and honor. How the reader and unlikely hero come to self-knowledge on his harrowing trip is an exhilarating mystery, a triumph we have forgotten to expect of literature. '-Jose Yglesias. inventory #26211.
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Seller's Description:
Very good. 18 cm. xii, [2], 146 pages. Introduction by Jorge Amado. Minor edge soiling. João Ubaldo Ribeiro (January 23, 1941-July 18, 2014) was a Brazilian writer, journalist, screenwriter and professor. Several of his books and short tales have been turned into movies and TV series in Brazil. Ribeiro was member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, being elected in 1994. At the time of his death many considered him to be Brazil's greatest contemporary novelist. In 1964 Ribeiro left the country for political reasons and went to the United States to study economics. But in 1965 he returned to Brazil and lectured in political science at the Universidade Federal da Bahia. After six years, he was, however, back on his academic career and went back to journalism. In 1971 his novel Sargento Getúlio was published, with which he made his breakthrough as a writer. Derived from a Kirkus review: The Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado calls this book by his countryman "a great novel". There's no denying, even from a translation (by the author himself), that this is a muscular, unyielding, and significant work. Sergeant Getulio is a killer but not a death machine of the modern style. Sent into the Brazilian backwater to escort a political prisoner to jail, Getulio, accompanied by only a driver named Amaro, gets and brutalizes his man, beating all the while through the brush and stopping overnight at a farmer's house where troops aligned with the prisoner try, unsuccessfully, to effect a liberation. The carnage throughout is unremittingly gory--the prisoner is tortured gruesomely. The threesome of Getulio, Amaro, and the prisoner become the hunted--and the book begins to have a Godot-like feel, a wasteland with morals compromised beyond horror. Getulio is clearly a monster and hero at the same time, and Ribeiro's large achievement is to keep us wondering how can this be.
