Literary places in São Francisco

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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