Mr. Amado is Brazil's most illustrious and venerable novelist, and a veteran rhapsodist of its native assets. He has also taken a radical line politically, and spoken up emotively for the poor and disfavored. In "Tieta" he has gone soft, celebrating the goodness and vitality of his home province of Bahia, more from memory than conviction, and at crushing length. This is a slow, explicit, sentimental novel with a theme that might have made a short, sharp fable….

[Tieta herself] is, as they say, a catalyst, an agent of change who herself knows of only one way to behave, warmly and openly; she is the original golden-hearted whore. Her goings-on would be more entertaining if they didn't go on so. Mr. Amado spells everything out and tells us again and again what sort of people his very simple characters are, as if there were some danger of our...