The Land

THE LAND - Portuguese-English parallel text. Euclides da Cunha took the sufferings of the Brazilian Wilderness upon himself, as anyone who has read this powerful text will certainly know. To start with, his panoramic description of the massive geological structures of the great land are so vivid that he could almost have surveyed them from a balloon. At the other end of the spectrum, his close-ups of its glittering mineralogy in a severely eroded landscape, with its climate of violent changes, form the background of a heroic tale of survival as the hard-bitten flora of that arid region struggles to come to terms with its intense heat, and finds ingenious methods of adapting to it. Less popular than the subsequent volumes of this great work, because it contains no battles and betrayals, 'The Land' is nevertheless a true key to the character of a most brilliant writer.