Backlands

"Euclides da Cunha was a military engineer turned journalist who, in the 1890s, covered a rebellion of pro-monarchist settlers in Canudos, in the Northeast of Brazil, led by a religious fanatic called Antonio Conselheiro, who thought that Brazil becoming a republic meant the end of the world. The army was sent in to crush the rebellion five times and 15,000 people were killed. This book is about the campaign but it’s also about Brazilian society, about Brazil and religious fanaticism. What I took away from it as a journalist was that if you’re looking for the heart of Brazil you have to get away from the large cities and out into the hinterlands, into the countryside. It has been of great practical use to me personally that way. It’s specifically about a Christian kind of messianism that has to do with the end of the empire in 1889-90 and the sense of dislocation the peasantry felt. The real power and vitality of fanaticism and where it can lead is, of course, relevant to us a century later, and it’s what led Mario Vargas Llosa to write The War of the End of the World , also about Canudos, in which Euclides da Cunha is a character. The version I’m used to seeing is called Rebellion in the Backlands , but Penguin has just put out a new version called Backlands: The Canudos Campaign . It’s a beautiful translation but I don’t much like the title. This is reportage that becomes literature and transcends the limits of journalism, to create something that is still powerful and still being read. A lot of Brazilians would argue that this book marked the beginning of modern Brazilian literature."