SOURCE: "The Wages of Virtue," in Chicago Tribune Books, November 21, 1993, pp. 6-7.

In the following review, Polk discusses Amado's War of the Saints and states that "Amado has also found that his surest weapon against the related evils of puritanism and fascism is ridicule … he employs that weapon to sure and constant effect."

Jorge Amado (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Showdown, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon) sets his latest novel, as he has most of his nearly 20 others, in his home territory, the Brazilian city and state of Bahia. A better stage for the crazy, intertwined dramas of The War of the Saints is hard to imagine.

A place "where everything is intermixed and commingled, where no one can separate virtue from sin, or distinguish the certain from the absurd or the line between truth and trickery, between reality and dream," Bahia is comfortable with the unexpected, familiar...