If we were back in the 1940s [Tereza Batista: Home From The Wars] would be a great vehicle for Dorothy Dandridge, or maybe Rita Hayworth in brownface. [Amado's] heroine, Tereza Batista, is a lithe and loving, copper-colored saint, a glorious nonesuch from the subcontinent, a fantastic beauty with a bod of bods, a prism of strength, a champion prostitute, a magnificent concubine, the personification of selflessness, a martyr to charity, a paradigm of virtue and fidelity, a cop-kicker and leper-licker, but also, sad to say, rather a bore, and a literary joke.

Amado has written a sensual, comic work this time out, again about Bahia in Brazil, again with all the lavish detail of life as it is lived in the torrential spew of his imagination….

Perhaps also, in his own language, the book is different from the product at hand. The translation … is fine English. Yet it...