Mapped
Dom Casmurro
Machado de Assis
The embittered old Bento Santiago, nicknamed Dom Casmurro, looks back on his boyhood love and marriage to the enigmatic Capitu, and on the jealousy, perhaps groundless, that convinced him she betrayed him with his best friend. Machado sets it in the real Rio of the Second Empire: the childhood house on Matacavalos and the wall between it and Capitu's, the seminary he is promised to, the church at Glória where his life turns, and the Flamengo shore where the sea takes his friend Escobar.
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Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon
Jorge Amado
In the cocoa-boom port of Ilhéus on the Bahia coast around 1925, two stories run together: the Syrian bar-owner Nacib's love for his cinnamon-skinned cook Gabriela, and the town's struggle between the old cocoa colonels and the modernisers who want to open the harbour bar to ocean ships. Amado maps his own city: the bars and cathedral square of Ilhéus, the treacherous sandbar at the harbour mouth, and the cocoa plantations inland whose blood-soaked wealth built the whole coast.
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The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
João Guimarães Rosa
Rosa's sertão is the vast dry backland of northern Minas Gerais and western Bahia, threaded by the São Francisco river and lifted into the high open plains the locals call the gerais. The ex-jagunço Riobaldo talks his whole life out in a single unbroken monologue, and its geography is deliberately diffuse: real towns and rivers surface as landmarks in a wandering that loops across hundreds of kilometres. The map runs north from Rosa's own country near Cordisburgo up the river past São Romão and São Francisco to the highland ranges near the Bahia border.
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