Review by Booklist Review
When Jorge Amado penned this novel more than 40 years ago, cacao was king in the lush northeast coastal regions of his native Brazil. The fruit of the golden cacao trees held wealth and power for anyone who could possess the land: all others would be exploited. When the novel opens, the Brazilians who took the land by force control its riches. The men who cultivate the precious beans for export live out their miserable lives in slavelike conditions. The women are schemers who use sex to get what they can't secure by other means. As Amado adds foreign exporters to the plot, he dramatizes how the disparity of class, race, and sex in South America polarizes people into fascist and communist camps. This is the novel's first English translation, and Amado's complex, poetic writing holds up admirably. Yet there are problems. The novel will be viewed today as racist and sexist, even as Amado cries out for change. One also wonders if Amado still thinks communism would right the wrongs in his country. The book would benefit greatly from a contemporary introduction by the author. ~--Robin Hohman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At the center of Brazilian writer Amado's novel--originally published in 1944 and translated into English here for the first time--is the cacao tree, whose seeds are used in chocolate-making. Amado ( The Violent Land ) chronicles the effects of a cacao boom--when ``not even gold was as highly prized--and bust on the people of Ilheus, a city in Brazil's south. The fortunes of Ilheus's citizens unfold in sync and counterpoint to cacao's. For exporter Carlos Zude, the boom represents limitless opportunity to make money. For Julieta, his wife, such wealth means illness (``Neurasthenia . . . a disease that comes from not having enough to do'') and with cacao's crash comes her cure. Amado demonstrates an impressive feel for his characters and subject down to the intricacies of splitting cacao pods: ``a badly aimed stroke . . . would send the heavy blade through the pod and cut the hand that held it.'' Yet even his abrupt shifts from narrative past to present tense--intended to telescope the action--can't quicken this novel's plodding pace nor offset its predictable plot. Landers's translation, moreover, renders rural Brazilian Portugese in idioms of the southern U.S.--``I'll learn you some respect''--with awkward effects. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Here, in the first English translation of a novel written some 40 years ago, Amado (Pen, Sword, Camisole, 1985, etc.) strikes off with his trademark exuberance--this time to tell the cautionary tale of how brokered cacao devastates the economy, ecology, and societal structure of the Brazilian provincial port of Ilheus. The chief villain is the middleman, Carlos Zude, a cuckolded but financially ambitious exporter, who decides in the unsettled political climate of pre-WW II that he and his cronies can do as much for setting the price of the commodity as the big exchanges. Reading a scarcity situation shrewdly, he sets off a boom in the crop that at first seems to benefit Ilheus boundlessly. Until the bust, that is, when the reality rises up--the reality being that the poor have remained poor (and gotten even poorer), that the rain forest has been cut down to provide more acreage for cacao planting (Amado lets us know that this is not a new problem), and that the autocratic but at least locally based plantation system is destroyed with little to replace it. Amado seems to surrender to the material halfway through- -chapters become shorter and shorter, merely notational--and the scantiness of characterization is disappointing from so lusty and zestful a writer. Still, Amado provides us with the fullness of Brazilian reality and modern history that no other writer we read in translation does.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
