["The Third Bank of the River"] takes on even more poignance than it already possesses with the death last November of Guimarães Rosa, a distinguished Brazilian writer-diplomat who was, quite simply, Brazil's most distinguished contemporary writer….

Like Borges, once we are in his world, one sentence in, it is almost impossible not to go on. There is a magnet inside each story. His universe is at once vast and reduced—it starts with the gutty reality of the backlands, but he is in no sense an expansive writer….

"The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories" published in Brazil in 1962 as "First Stories," points up a newly attained distance from local realities; the stories are much closer to the self, so much more "essential." There is in them a sense of leave-taking, elegiac in tone, along with an even more scrupulous reading of Nature's signs. Guimar...