[João Guimarães Rosa] has given depth, new vigor, and a sort of universal applicability to the regionalism that characterized much of Brazil's best modern fiction but which, prior to his advent, appeared nearly spent. He has also enriched the language—that is, Brazilian Portuguese—by his imaginative, lyrical prose, which defies both the dictionary and conventional syntax….

All nine of the stories in Sagarana are beguiling and three of them are, beyond question, masterpieces. The author has made the Brazilian backlands into a vast (and therefore paradoxical) microcosm. With his voraciously perceptive mind and his own special tension between discipline and emotional abundance, he has poured into these stories an almost Shakespearean wealth of experience….

[Love and humor] pervade the book. The humor is mostly ironic. If there is any quality that persists through the years in the best Luso-Brazilian fiction, it is irony. It unites...