"The Devil to Pay in the Backlands" deserves [acclaim]…. Rosa has written nothing less than a twentieth-century Brazilian "Iliad." Told in a powerful and sensitive vernacular …, his story captures the peculiar ambience of the feuds that formerly raged throughout the northern Minas Gerais and turns it into the genuine background of epic.

"Notes on Current Books: 'The Devil to Pay in the Backlands'," in The Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright, 1964, by The Virginia Quarterly Review, The University of Virginia), Vol. 40, No. 4 (Autumn, 1964), p. xvi.