The Devil to Pay in the Backlands

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.

Riobaldo

Cordisburgo

The storyteller's country

The whole book is one old man talking, and the talk comes out of country like this. Rosa was born in Cordisburgo, in central Minas, and grew up among the drovers and backland speech he later reworked into Riobaldo's monologue. It is where the storytelling begins, even though the wandering it describes lies further north.

Riobaldo's narration (frame)

inspired by Cordisburgo does not appear in the novel; it is Rosa's birthplace and the country whose speech and cattle-droving world he carries into the book. It anchors the southern edge of the map as the source of the voice, not as a scene.

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