Canudos & Antonio Conselheiro

Fiction & non-fiction Books about the Canudos
community, movement & massacre in northeastern Brazil

Brazilian Sound

Vale Of Tears:
Revisiting The Canudos Massacre
In Northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897
by Robert M. Levine

The massacre of Canudos In 1897 is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. Looking at the event through the eyes of the inhabitants, Levine challenges traditional interpretations and gives weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-raced descent and were thus perceived as opponents to progress and civilization. In 1897 Brazilian military forces destroyed the millenarian settlement of Canudos, murdering as many as 35,000 pious rural folk who had taken refuge in the remote northeast backlands of Brazil. Fictionalized in Mario Vargas Llosa's acclaimed novel, War at the End of the World, Canudos is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. When looked at through the eyes of the inhabitants of Canudos, however, this historical incident lends itself to a bold new interpretation which challenges the traditional polemics on the subject. While the Canudos movement has been consistently viewed either as a rebellion of crazed fanatics or as a model of proletarian resistance to oppression, Levine deftly demonstrates that it was, in fact, neither. Vale of Tears probes the reasons for the Brazilian ambivalence toward its social history, giving much weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-race descent. They were perceived as opponents to progress and civilization and, by inference, to Brazil's attempts to "whiten" itself. As a result there are major insights to be found here into Brazilians' self-image over the past century. --book description

Rebellion In The Backlands (Os Sertões)
by Euclides Da Cunha

Euclides da Cunha's classic account of the brutal campaigns against religious mystic Antonio Conselheiro has been called the Bible of Brazilian nationality. "Euclides da Cunha went on the campaigns [against Conselheiro] as a journalist and what he returned with and published in 1902 is still unsurpassed in Latin American literature. Cunha is a talent as grand, spacious, entangled with knowledge, curiosity, and bafflement as the country itself. . . . On every page there is a heart of idea, speculation, dramatic observation that tells of a creative mission undertaken, the identity of the nation, and also the creation of a pure and eloquent prose style."--Elizabeth Hardwick

The War Of The End Of The World
by Mario Vargas Llosa

This is perhaps Vargas Llosa's best novel and a must for all those well-meaning readers in the developed world who eagerly idealize Latin American revolutions without knowing anything about these countries. The book is based on the true story of Antonio Vicente Mendes Maciel ("O Conselheiro"), a mad prophet of sorts -kind of a weird Christian ayatollah of the late XIX Century- who ignited, in the most remote corner of Brazil, a bloody uprising among the lowly against Money, Property, Progress, Law, Army, Republic and State, and everything else he found oppressive, sinful and evil. In return, the Brazilian government reacted with indifference, disbelief, concern, anger, outrage and total annihilation. Little by little, Vargas Llosa transforms this obscure anecdote into a monumental epic of Tolstoiesque proportions that not only hooks you on the plot but reveals the richly interwoven tapestry of Brazilian -and therefore Latin American- society; its illusions and delusions, its races and classes, its loves and hates, its fear of the modern and its contempt for the past, and the fanaticism that pervades both attitudes (to date). Our development always seems to engender inequality and our social struggles to defend backwardness and ignorance. Vargas Llosa is acutely aware of this, and he conveys it in his story splendidly, without preaching, without agendas, without aloofness and without letting you put down the book. --an Amazon reviewer
 

The Bandit King: Lampião Of Brazil
by Billy Jaynes Chandler
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