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socorrobaptista's review against another edition
4.0
Não é um livro fácil de ler, foi um grande desafio. Mas é sem dúvida riquíssimo, e merecedor de muito destaque na literatura brasileira, principalmente por suas descrições realistas, talvez um pouco preconceituosas, do que o autor via e percebia em sua viagem pelos sertões para acompanhar a tomada de Canudos. Muito bom.
igormdemiranda's review against another edition
5.0
Ao ler as primeiras páginas de 'Os Sertões' me surpreendi muito. Poucos escritores na história — só Marcel Proust e Antoine de Saint-Exupéry praticamente — haviam conseguido me emocionar pelas suas capacidades de escrita (não pelo que escrevem, mas como escrevem). E ali estava Euclides da Cunha fazendo o mesmo:
"Os próprios tiros mal quebravam o silêncio: não havia ecos nos ares rarefeitos, irrespiráveis. Os estampidos estalavam, secos, sem ressoarem; e a brutalidade humana rolava surdamente dentro da quietude universal das coisas..."
Dividido em 3 partes bastante distintas, 'Os Sertões' conta com uma parte inicial e poética sobre a terra sertaneja; uma parte intermediária que conta sobre o homem sertanejo, o aparecimento de Antônio Conselheiro e a formação do Arraial de Canudos; e a parte final, tratando das inúmeras incursões do exército para derrubá-lo.
Mas por que tanta vontade de vê-los cair?
O arraial de Canudos incomodava os fazendeiros dos arredores, já que muitos de seus funcionários os abandonavam para viver no lugar santo. Eles não podiam aceitar isso. E pra provar que espalhar notícias falsas já funcionava naqueles tempos, inventaram que o Arraial era anti-republicano. Foi o bastante para inflamar a população e as tropas que os tratavam como inimigos reais. Primeiro, com arrogância, depois, com receios, e por último, avassaladoramente. Por mais forte que o sertanejo fosse, não havia como enfrentar os exércitos de todos os cantos do Brasil. Eles aguentaram o quanto puderam, mas caíram.
Só lendo pude compreender que, apesar de falar sobre a batalha de Canudos e de uma das figuras mais notáveis da história brasileira (Antônio Conselheiro), o protagonista do livro é um e somente um: o próprio Sertão. Por isso, Euclides da Cunha estava tão certo em chamá-lo de tal forma. Foi o sertão que produziu aqueles homens duros que batalharam por meses com porções mínimas de paçoca e água. Foi o sertão e a sua força que abateram batalhões e batalhões que tentaram derrubar Canudos.
E foi o sertão que sobrou no massacre.
Ao fim, Euclides da Cunha para de relatar apenas jornalisticamente o evento. Ele parece realmente exaurido, estupefato pela barbárie, pela carnificina. Não há o que comemorar.
O homenageado da Flip desse ano merece todas as honras: 'Os Sertões' é um livro maravilhoso.
"Os próprios tiros mal quebravam o silêncio: não havia ecos nos ares rarefeitos, irrespiráveis. Os estampidos estalavam, secos, sem ressoarem; e a brutalidade humana rolava surdamente dentro da quietude universal das coisas..."
Dividido em 3 partes bastante distintas, 'Os Sertões' conta com uma parte inicial e poética sobre a terra sertaneja; uma parte intermediária que conta sobre o homem sertanejo, o aparecimento de Antônio Conselheiro e a formação do Arraial de Canudos; e a parte final, tratando das inúmeras incursões do exército para derrubá-lo.
Mas por que tanta vontade de vê-los cair?
O arraial de Canudos incomodava os fazendeiros dos arredores, já que muitos de seus funcionários os abandonavam para viver no lugar santo. Eles não podiam aceitar isso. E pra provar que espalhar notícias falsas já funcionava naqueles tempos, inventaram que o Arraial era anti-republicano. Foi o bastante para inflamar a população e as tropas que os tratavam como inimigos reais. Primeiro, com arrogância, depois, com receios, e por último, avassaladoramente. Por mais forte que o sertanejo fosse, não havia como enfrentar os exércitos de todos os cantos do Brasil. Eles aguentaram o quanto puderam, mas caíram.
Só lendo pude compreender que, apesar de falar sobre a batalha de Canudos e de uma das figuras mais notáveis da história brasileira (Antônio Conselheiro), o protagonista do livro é um e somente um: o próprio Sertão. Por isso, Euclides da Cunha estava tão certo em chamá-lo de tal forma. Foi o sertão que produziu aqueles homens duros que batalharam por meses com porções mínimas de paçoca e água. Foi o sertão e a sua força que abateram batalhões e batalhões que tentaram derrubar Canudos.
E foi o sertão que sobrou no massacre.
Ao fim, Euclides da Cunha para de relatar apenas jornalisticamente o evento. Ele parece realmente exaurido, estupefato pela barbárie, pela carnificina. Não há o que comemorar.
O homenageado da Flip desse ano merece todas as honras: 'Os Sertões' é um livro maravilhoso.
gef's review against another edition
4.0
A couple of weeks ago, I re-read Euclides da Cunha, Backlands: the Canudos Campaign, trad. Elizabeth Lowe (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), better to understand its relation to Mario Vargas Llosa's 900-page novel, La guerra del fin del mundo, about the same bloody episode in Brazil's northeastern backwoods in the 1890s. For some of the background on these two books, please see my earlier weblog entry History, fiction and historical fiction which is the first part of this essay.
Da Cunha's book is considered a classic of Brazilian literature. It is dramatic, moving, encyclopedic and often — like its author — grandiloquently, pigheadedly wrong. The savage war in the Brazilian northeast backlands of Bahia state from 1893 to 1897 was a defining event of the new Brazilian republic, and Euclides da Cunha's amazingly vivid account of it, Os sertões, is considered by many Brazilians as their country's most outstanding literary achievement. That should be reason enough to put it high on your reading list. But even if you don't care about this huge country (192 million people, a booming economy, a territory amounting to almost half the South American continent) that is rapidly rising to world influence, you will want to understand the dynamics of that war, because it has parallels to some of the world's most critical struggles today.
That it also inspired Vargas Llosa's powerful and complex novel is for me an equally important reason for studying it. Vargas Llosa insists that he has never written a "historical novel", "a more or less animated retelling of historical events", which he apparently thinks of as a lesser category of literature. What he has done here and in La fiesta del chivo and his new novel on Roger Casement is to use thoroughly researched historical events to tell an original story that helps us feel and understand those events from an original perspective. And that's what I've tried to do in A Gift for the Sultan. To me, it's what a historical novel should be, and this is why I'm fascinated by the ways Vargas Llosa handles his material.
But first, lets look at the material, the documented historical events, filtered through Da Cunha, that Vargas Llosa was working with. Every local and traditionalist movement is peculiar, the more local the more peculiar, and the movement around the holy man Antônio Conselheiro in the dense, ramshackle settlement of Canudos was so peculiar that the sophisticates in Salvador de Bahia or Rio de Janeiro could not believe it. A primitively armed, fanatically devout poor rural people was defeating every invasion by a modern, disciplined and experienced army with all the latest technology and firepower.
Sound familiar? They didn't have car-bombs or suicide belts, but they were ingenious at using everything they did have (even slingshots and crossbows, plus traps and tricks) and did not hesitate to sacrifice their own lives to destroy an enemy that they saw as the Devil incarnate.
Brazil had just become a republic in 1889, when the army deposed the ailing and weary Emperor Pedro II. Only a year earlier, Dom Pedro had achieved his long-held ambition to abolish slavery—provoking the wrath of slave-using coffee-growers and contributing to the anti-monarchical sentiment among the urban elite that led to Dom Pedro's downfall.
The rebellion in the backlands began as defiance against the republic and its new laws. A wandering visionary named Antônio Maciel, known as o conselheiro (the counselor), gathered a growing following as he denounced such impieties as a census (he said its purpose was to count people who would be returned to slavery), civil marriages and non-religious burials (an offense to God), and taxes (instead of tithes to the Church). He and most of his followers were barely literate, so we have only fragments of his preaching and exhortations recorded by people who regarded them as holy, and reconstructions from oral accounts by those who heard him. With the few believers he allowed to accompany him, he strode continually through the mountains, caatinga (shrubland), arroyos and canyons, stopping at each settlement to preach and also to command the restoration of abandoned chapels and cemeteries or the building of grand new ones, which he would demand be attended by a priest. The Catholic Church didn't know what to make of him. Sometimes a curate would invite him to preach, but the church hierarchy was suspicious of his strange sermons, equating the republic with "the Dog"—meaning the Devil—and predicting the end of the world and the advent of the Good Jesus to the backlands. But what caught the authorities' attention was his destruction of official edicts proclaiming the census, elections and taxes, and his orders not to obey any authorities of the republic.
The governor of Bahia and the military chiefs in Rio assumed it would be simple to put down this nuisance, and sent a military expedition to quash it. It was destroyed. They sent another, much larger one, under the command of a hero of several other repressive campaigns, and this turned out even more disastrous—Col. Moreira César and thousands of his troops were killed, their huge Krups cannons seized, and the surviving troops chased from the territory. This was incomprehensible from primitively armed cowhands and homesteaders. The excitable press and their elite backers kept inventing more plausible (but completely fallacious) explanations for the ongoing disaster. They must be secretly financed by aristocrats who wanted to restore the empire, and/or by British capitalists who for other reasons wanted to dismember the republic.
A former military man turned journalist and a fervent republican — that is, supporter of the coup that had deposed the Brazilian emperor in 1891 in order to "modernize" the country — Da Cunha got himself embedded in what turned out to be the final, and finally successful campaign to destroy the rebels. Os sertões is not an easy book to follow, mainly because Da Cunha wants to tell so many different stories all at the same time: how the land forms of Brazil were created, how climate affects the habits of cattlemen and farmers in different regions, the history of settlement and pillage from earliest colonial times, and only then, after you've got through all that, the story of the "war", one failed military campaign after another until finally the rebellious settlement is overcome and eliminated. (A particular problem with this translation is the lack of maps, making it almost impossible to follow all the military maneuvers or the geological descriptions in detail.) For much of the book, the real protagonist is not the army or the Canudos resistance nor any of its human participants, but the land itself, which Da Cunha describes as a living thing, crashing thunderbolts and rainstorms to flood out farms and fragile villages, or sucking down every last drop of water and splitting open deep gorges during the droughts, then sprouting its hard sharp foliage to slash human invaders, almost as though the backlands were laughing at human attempts to civilize them..
Another difficulty is that Da Cunha's literary standards, what he considered good writing, were so different from those of any of our contemporary best-selling authors. He is forever digressing and interrupting himself for the sake of reaching an especially dramatic phrase or description. And there is the additional problem that some of the things he asserts are completely screwball, especially race as determining character and ability. Then when the supposedly primitive and intellectually simple blacks or Amerindians or mestizos of the Canudos settlement keep outsmarting the supposedly superior Portuguese-descended commanders sent out to crush them, not acting according to type, he tries to explain it by phrenology — the shape of the cranium as a clue to brain development, in this case, of the wily savagery of the Canudos defenders.
And there are many contradictions like this, because Da Cunha, though fervently on the side of the army, is often overwhelmed by sympathy for the supposedly inferior (racially and culturally) "enemy" who resists that army with courage and ingenuity. If they are so inferior, how can they be so smart and so brave? And how can they, with such poor weapons, obliterate one Brazilian army campaign after another? This gets the author into some very complex speculations about racial mixing and its peculiar consequences, and how those races were somehow better adapted to the harsh physical environment of the backlands. It's as though the social groupings there — the Indians, the blacks, the mestizos — were themselves parts of the natural environment, not to be thought of as "intelligent" any more than the climate or the vegetation or the sharp-edged geology, but that all together they composed the hostile, alien environment that overwhelmed the urban, cultured, white military officers with their neatly formed batallions and cannons and bugle calls.
Vargas Llosa rehumanizes these characters. He takes da Cunha's scattered and often admiring portraits of the famously cruel and brutal bandits Paheú, João Grande and João Abade — real outlaws converted to the Counselor's faith to become fierce defenders of the community — and others and develops them into full, complex psychological characters whose intelligence and human sensibilities, and the wrongs they've suffered and the things they desire, make fully understandable what for da Cunha were simply unexplainable and unreasoned acts of instinct. And he also invents characters — a "near-sighted journalist" (unnamed), a Scottish anarchist who calls himself Galileo Gall, the baron of Cañabrava, the much-abused Jurema, and various midlevel Brazilian military men among them — to let us see this conflict from other points of view. In all, it is a magnificent denunciation of fanaticism, not just (not even principally) of the Counselor's faithful followers, but also (and even more evidently) the fanaticism of those who thought they were bringing civilization but ended up bringing only total destruction to this poor community.
Like Chechenya, and many other places. It's a marvelous, passionate and thought-provoking novel.
Da Cunha's book is considered a classic of Brazilian literature. It is dramatic, moving, encyclopedic and often — like its author — grandiloquently, pigheadedly wrong. The savage war in the Brazilian northeast backlands of Bahia state from 1893 to 1897 was a defining event of the new Brazilian republic, and Euclides da Cunha's amazingly vivid account of it, Os sertões, is considered by many Brazilians as their country's most outstanding literary achievement. That should be reason enough to put it high on your reading list. But even if you don't care about this huge country (192 million people, a booming economy, a territory amounting to almost half the South American continent) that is rapidly rising to world influence, you will want to understand the dynamics of that war, because it has parallels to some of the world's most critical struggles today.
That it also inspired Vargas Llosa's powerful and complex novel is for me an equally important reason for studying it. Vargas Llosa insists that he has never written a "historical novel", "a more or less animated retelling of historical events", which he apparently thinks of as a lesser category of literature. What he has done here and in La fiesta del chivo and his new novel on Roger Casement is to use thoroughly researched historical events to tell an original story that helps us feel and understand those events from an original perspective. And that's what I've tried to do in A Gift for the Sultan. To me, it's what a historical novel should be, and this is why I'm fascinated by the ways Vargas Llosa handles his material.
But first, lets look at the material, the documented historical events, filtered through Da Cunha, that Vargas Llosa was working with. Every local and traditionalist movement is peculiar, the more local the more peculiar, and the movement around the holy man Antônio Conselheiro in the dense, ramshackle settlement of Canudos was so peculiar that the sophisticates in Salvador de Bahia or Rio de Janeiro could not believe it. A primitively armed, fanatically devout poor rural people was defeating every invasion by a modern, disciplined and experienced army with all the latest technology and firepower.
Sound familiar? They didn't have car-bombs or suicide belts, but they were ingenious at using everything they did have (even slingshots and crossbows, plus traps and tricks) and did not hesitate to sacrifice their own lives to destroy an enemy that they saw as the Devil incarnate.
Brazil had just become a republic in 1889, when the army deposed the ailing and weary Emperor Pedro II. Only a year earlier, Dom Pedro had achieved his long-held ambition to abolish slavery—provoking the wrath of slave-using coffee-growers and contributing to the anti-monarchical sentiment among the urban elite that led to Dom Pedro's downfall.
The rebellion in the backlands began as defiance against the republic and its new laws. A wandering visionary named Antônio Maciel, known as o conselheiro (the counselor), gathered a growing following as he denounced such impieties as a census (he said its purpose was to count people who would be returned to slavery), civil marriages and non-religious burials (an offense to God), and taxes (instead of tithes to the Church). He and most of his followers were barely literate, so we have only fragments of his preaching and exhortations recorded by people who regarded them as holy, and reconstructions from oral accounts by those who heard him. With the few believers he allowed to accompany him, he strode continually through the mountains, caatinga (shrubland), arroyos and canyons, stopping at each settlement to preach and also to command the restoration of abandoned chapels and cemeteries or the building of grand new ones, which he would demand be attended by a priest. The Catholic Church didn't know what to make of him. Sometimes a curate would invite him to preach, but the church hierarchy was suspicious of his strange sermons, equating the republic with "the Dog"—meaning the Devil—and predicting the end of the world and the advent of the Good Jesus to the backlands. But what caught the authorities' attention was his destruction of official edicts proclaiming the census, elections and taxes, and his orders not to obey any authorities of the republic.
The governor of Bahia and the military chiefs in Rio assumed it would be simple to put down this nuisance, and sent a military expedition to quash it. It was destroyed. They sent another, much larger one, under the command of a hero of several other repressive campaigns, and this turned out even more disastrous—Col. Moreira César and thousands of his troops were killed, their huge Krups cannons seized, and the surviving troops chased from the territory. This was incomprehensible from primitively armed cowhands and homesteaders. The excitable press and their elite backers kept inventing more plausible (but completely fallacious) explanations for the ongoing disaster. They must be secretly financed by aristocrats who wanted to restore the empire, and/or by British capitalists who for other reasons wanted to dismember the republic.
A former military man turned journalist and a fervent republican — that is, supporter of the coup that had deposed the Brazilian emperor in 1891 in order to "modernize" the country — Da Cunha got himself embedded in what turned out to be the final, and finally successful campaign to destroy the rebels. Os sertões is not an easy book to follow, mainly because Da Cunha wants to tell so many different stories all at the same time: how the land forms of Brazil were created, how climate affects the habits of cattlemen and farmers in different regions, the history of settlement and pillage from earliest colonial times, and only then, after you've got through all that, the story of the "war", one failed military campaign after another until finally the rebellious settlement is overcome and eliminated. (A particular problem with this translation is the lack of maps, making it almost impossible to follow all the military maneuvers or the geological descriptions in detail.) For much of the book, the real protagonist is not the army or the Canudos resistance nor any of its human participants, but the land itself, which Da Cunha describes as a living thing, crashing thunderbolts and rainstorms to flood out farms and fragile villages, or sucking down every last drop of water and splitting open deep gorges during the droughts, then sprouting its hard sharp foliage to slash human invaders, almost as though the backlands were laughing at human attempts to civilize them..
Another difficulty is that Da Cunha's literary standards, what he considered good writing, were so different from those of any of our contemporary best-selling authors. He is forever digressing and interrupting himself for the sake of reaching an especially dramatic phrase or description. And there is the additional problem that some of the things he asserts are completely screwball, especially race as determining character and ability. Then when the supposedly primitive and intellectually simple blacks or Amerindians or mestizos of the Canudos settlement keep outsmarting the supposedly superior Portuguese-descended commanders sent out to crush them, not acting according to type, he tries to explain it by phrenology — the shape of the cranium as a clue to brain development, in this case, of the wily savagery of the Canudos defenders.
And there are many contradictions like this, because Da Cunha, though fervently on the side of the army, is often overwhelmed by sympathy for the supposedly inferior (racially and culturally) "enemy" who resists that army with courage and ingenuity. If they are so inferior, how can they be so smart and so brave? And how can they, with such poor weapons, obliterate one Brazilian army campaign after another? This gets the author into some very complex speculations about racial mixing and its peculiar consequences, and how those races were somehow better adapted to the harsh physical environment of the backlands. It's as though the social groupings there — the Indians, the blacks, the mestizos — were themselves parts of the natural environment, not to be thought of as "intelligent" any more than the climate or the vegetation or the sharp-edged geology, but that all together they composed the hostile, alien environment that overwhelmed the urban, cultured, white military officers with their neatly formed batallions and cannons and bugle calls.
Vargas Llosa rehumanizes these characters. He takes da Cunha's scattered and often admiring portraits of the famously cruel and brutal bandits Paheú, João Grande and João Abade — real outlaws converted to the Counselor's faith to become fierce defenders of the community — and others and develops them into full, complex psychological characters whose intelligence and human sensibilities, and the wrongs they've suffered and the things they desire, make fully understandable what for da Cunha were simply unexplainable and unreasoned acts of instinct. And he also invents characters — a "near-sighted journalist" (unnamed), a Scottish anarchist who calls himself Galileo Gall, the baron of Cañabrava, the much-abused Jurema, and various midlevel Brazilian military men among them — to let us see this conflict from other points of view. In all, it is a magnificent denunciation of fanaticism, not just (not even principally) of the Counselor's faithful followers, but also (and even more evidently) the fanaticism of those who thought they were bringing civilization but ended up bringing only total destruction to this poor community.
Like Chechenya, and many other places. It's a marvelous, passionate and thought-provoking novel.
febeyer's review against another edition
3.0
In Canudos, a backlands town in the Northeastern State of Bahia, Antônio Conselheiro (Anthony the Counselor) preached against the republic. His followers, leather-clad ruffians or 'jagungos', terrorised the countryside. In the 1890s the Republic of Brazil was in its infancy and insecure, rumours of monarchist plots abounded, troublemakers like the Counselor needed to be dealt with. He had gathered a large following, apparently for his indifference to suffering rather than his skill as a preacher.
“His had been a harsh schooling indeed, in hunger, thirst, bodily weariness, repressed anguish and deep-seated misery. There were no tortures unknown to him. His withered epidermis was wrinkled as an old broken and trampled breastplate over his lifeless flesh. Pain itself had come to be his anaesthetic; he bruised and macerated that flesh with hairshirts more cruel than any matweed; he dragged it over the stones of the road; he scorched it in the embers of the drought; he exposed it to the rigors of the cold night dew; in his brief moments of repose he put it to bed on the lacerating couch of the caatingas.”
Soldiers carrying modern rifles bore down on the five thousand or so mud huts that made up Canudos. The jagungos armed with blunderbusses or 'trabucos' were completely outgunned and outnumbered. However, the Brazilain army was embarrassed, their expeditions from the coast were badly supplied and the march to Canudos was treacherous; their enemy was brave and resilient:
“The truth is, frugal and parsimonious in the extreme, these rude fighting men who in a time of peace would go through the day with two or three handfuls of passoca and a drink of water, had in a time of war made abstinence a matter of discipline and had carried it to so high a point that they were capable of an extraordinary degree of physical endurance.”
The army was bamboozled as the enemy employed hit and run tactics, using the terrain to their advantage. A handful of guerillas hammering a conventional army was a story to be echoed in Vietnam, Algeria and Cuba. The army had krugar artillery guns, labouriously dragged to the field of battle, they fired grenades but intially didn't bring much of an advantage. The army's most effective troops were the mounted 'vaquieros' from the south: gaucho cowboys who could at least round up some cattle for the starving soldiers, and there was a battalion of police who themselves were backlanders and could play the jagungos at their own game of hit and run.
The Canudos campaign happened in 1897 two years before the Boer War started. I’ve heard the British-Africaner conflict named the first to feature guerilla tactics, apparently not, and I doubt Canudos was the first either. Hundreds of wounded government soldiers wandering through the backlands on their return to civilisation became a scourge:
“The country along the roadside, which up to then had been populated, was now turned into a waste land, as these tumultuous bands stormed through it, leaving destruction in their wake, like the remnants of some caravan of limping savages.”
Da Cunha spends Part One of the book detailing the geology, flora and fauna of the backlands and also the racial make-up of its human inhabitants. The summary is that 'os sertões' (the backlands, literally drylands) are plagued by drought, treacherous terrain and prickly bushlands or 'caatingas', which tore through the soldiers' uniforms, but not the jagungos leather. The people, largely isolated from the coast for three hundred years, were of a particular racial mix and culture, in the main they were Caboclos (mixed white and Indians), there were also Cafuzos (mixed black and Indian), and Mulatos (mixed black and white). Da Cunha, who I think was of mixed race himself, calls these mestizos inferior. You have to remember social darwinist theories were popular at the time. Apparently the only pretty women in the backlands were of the “Jewish type”. As the narrative progresses Da Cunha changes his tune and recognises the resilience and resourcefulness of the sertanejos (backlanders). Part one of the book was unnecessary for me, as the author later describes the landscape so well in his battle narrative:
“Meanwhile, it was known that this road ran through long stretches of caatingas, necessitating the use of the pick in clearing a path; and it was further known, that a march of twenty-five miles in this midsummer season was out of the question unless each man carried a supply of water on his back, in the manner of the Roman legions in Tunisia.”
The writing is dense and the conflict in Canudos was a never ending string of muck-ups by the Brazilian army. Aware of course that the real problem came from the lack of strategy from the commanders, Da Cunha also explains the weaknesses of the common soldiers:
“In battle, to be sure, the Brazilian soldier is incapable of imitating the Prussian, by going in and coming out with a pedometer on his boot. He is disorderly, tumultuous, rowdy, a terrible but heroic blackguard, attacking the enemy whether by bullet or sword thrust with an ironic jest on his lips.”
Rebellion in the Backlands is a classic, it reminded me of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence because of the beautiful descriptions of a desert landscape. I also found there was a lot to wade through in between the odd passage in which Da Cunha’s prose (through translation) really shines. With the historical references and amount of detail, pathos and analysis here, Da Cunha was evidently an incredibly knowledgeable individual, he died in a gunfight with his wife's lover at age forty-three. An unfaithful wife was something he shared with Anthony the Counselor, for whom such a betrayal led to fifteen years wandering the backlands, and his subsequent elevation to mesianic status.
“His had been a harsh schooling indeed, in hunger, thirst, bodily weariness, repressed anguish and deep-seated misery. There were no tortures unknown to him. His withered epidermis was wrinkled as an old broken and trampled breastplate over his lifeless flesh. Pain itself had come to be his anaesthetic; he bruised and macerated that flesh with hairshirts more cruel than any matweed; he dragged it over the stones of the road; he scorched it in the embers of the drought; he exposed it to the rigors of the cold night dew; in his brief moments of repose he put it to bed on the lacerating couch of the caatingas.”
Soldiers carrying modern rifles bore down on the five thousand or so mud huts that made up Canudos. The jagungos armed with blunderbusses or 'trabucos' were completely outgunned and outnumbered. However, the Brazilain army was embarrassed, their expeditions from the coast were badly supplied and the march to Canudos was treacherous; their enemy was brave and resilient:
“The truth is, frugal and parsimonious in the extreme, these rude fighting men who in a time of peace would go through the day with two or three handfuls of passoca and a drink of water, had in a time of war made abstinence a matter of discipline and had carried it to so high a point that they were capable of an extraordinary degree of physical endurance.”
The army was bamboozled as the enemy employed hit and run tactics, using the terrain to their advantage. A handful of guerillas hammering a conventional army was a story to be echoed in Vietnam, Algeria and Cuba. The army had krugar artillery guns, labouriously dragged to the field of battle, they fired grenades but intially didn't bring much of an advantage. The army's most effective troops were the mounted 'vaquieros' from the south: gaucho cowboys who could at least round up some cattle for the starving soldiers, and there was a battalion of police who themselves were backlanders and could play the jagungos at their own game of hit and run.
The Canudos campaign happened in 1897 two years before the Boer War started. I’ve heard the British-Africaner conflict named the first to feature guerilla tactics, apparently not, and I doubt Canudos was the first either. Hundreds of wounded government soldiers wandering through the backlands on their return to civilisation became a scourge:
“The country along the roadside, which up to then had been populated, was now turned into a waste land, as these tumultuous bands stormed through it, leaving destruction in their wake, like the remnants of some caravan of limping savages.”
Da Cunha spends Part One of the book detailing the geology, flora and fauna of the backlands and also the racial make-up of its human inhabitants. The summary is that 'os sertões' (the backlands, literally drylands) are plagued by drought, treacherous terrain and prickly bushlands or 'caatingas', which tore through the soldiers' uniforms, but not the jagungos leather. The people, largely isolated from the coast for three hundred years, were of a particular racial mix and culture, in the main they were Caboclos (mixed white and Indians), there were also Cafuzos (mixed black and Indian), and Mulatos (mixed black and white). Da Cunha, who I think was of mixed race himself, calls these mestizos inferior. You have to remember social darwinist theories were popular at the time. Apparently the only pretty women in the backlands were of the “Jewish type”. As the narrative progresses Da Cunha changes his tune and recognises the resilience and resourcefulness of the sertanejos (backlanders). Part one of the book was unnecessary for me, as the author later describes the landscape so well in his battle narrative:
“Meanwhile, it was known that this road ran through long stretches of caatingas, necessitating the use of the pick in clearing a path; and it was further known, that a march of twenty-five miles in this midsummer season was out of the question unless each man carried a supply of water on his back, in the manner of the Roman legions in Tunisia.”
The writing is dense and the conflict in Canudos was a never ending string of muck-ups by the Brazilian army. Aware of course that the real problem came from the lack of strategy from the commanders, Da Cunha also explains the weaknesses of the common soldiers:
“In battle, to be sure, the Brazilian soldier is incapable of imitating the Prussian, by going in and coming out with a pedometer on his boot. He is disorderly, tumultuous, rowdy, a terrible but heroic blackguard, attacking the enemy whether by bullet or sword thrust with an ironic jest on his lips.”
Rebellion in the Backlands is a classic, it reminded me of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence because of the beautiful descriptions of a desert landscape. I also found there was a lot to wade through in between the odd passage in which Da Cunha’s prose (through translation) really shines. With the historical references and amount of detail, pathos and analysis here, Da Cunha was evidently an incredibly knowledgeable individual, he died in a gunfight with his wife's lover at age forty-three. An unfaithful wife was something he shared with Anthony the Counselor, for whom such a betrayal led to fifteen years wandering the backlands, and his subsequent elevation to mesianic status.
amandaalexandre's review against another edition
4.0
Dica: Este livro é dividido em 3 tomos. Ignore os dois primeiros (são CHATOS PARA CARAMBA) e comece a partir do final do segundo. É aí que o autor começa a contar a vida de Antônio Conselheiro. E no final, em que as tropas do governo esmagam a Revolta, é es-tar-re-ce-dor!
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