Vastlands: The Crossing

“A veritable linguistic tour de force.” —Mario Vargas Llosa

For the first time in over sixty years, one of Latin America’s greatest works of literature returns in a mesmerizing new translation by Alison Entrekin, featuring an introduction by Colm Tóibín.

Set in the sertão, a lawless expanse of Brazil’s high inland plateaus, where feuding warlords and their jagunços—hired guns—vie for political dominance, João Guimarães Rosa’s Vastlands: The Crossing unfurls in a single, searching monologue, following reformed jagunço Riobaldo from wayward youth to vigilante chief—and a possible encounter with the devil that may have changed his fate. As he rides into battle after battle to impose law and order in the sertão, he must embark on a quest to avenge a beloved leader who has been murdered by one of their own.

At once an epic of war on the plateaus and a profoundly tender love story, Vastlands: The Crossing is charged with longing, and an ode to the land itself; a mystical, near metaphysical, territory, haunted by the living and the dead, that refuses to be tamed. Riobaldo’s narration—restless, searching, and full of dazzling wordplay—circles the central mysteries of his life: his obsessive devotion to the enigmatic Diadorim, the ever-looming specter of the devil, and the cost of power and vengeance.

Long thought an impossible task, Entrekin’s masterful translation—the first to fully capture both the story and verbal acrobatics of the original in English—recreates Guimarães Rosa’s achievement, summoning as if from the birthplace of language a tale that is by turns devastating, mysterious, lush, violent, and beautiful, conjuring the original vitality, music, and endless linguistic invention of the original text for a new generation of readers.