Preliminary

Os Sertões - the book, was launched on December 2nd, 1902. This book has all the elements that a classic should have, it was innovated, deeply critique and can transmit the attention of the researches and the sensibility of a novelist that knows the power of the Portuguese language.

Euclides da Cunha's classic has tree parts (the land, the men and the war). The reader could find at first a scenery of the history and after that the characters fighting in the canudos' war.

The critics used to say that this book could be compared to Os Lusíadas by Luis de Camões or Dom Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. In the 90s a research was done with lots of intellectuals from many different areas (anthropology, sociology, history, literature) and the results shows us that Os Sertões was considered to be the most representative Brazilian book in all the areas and all the time.

The land

The first part of Os Sertões represents an analysis about backwoodsman territory. The most important part of this text is the interchange, that the author did between the scientific and literary narratives. Euclides da Cunha affirms that in the backwoods, the flora runs away from the sun hiding its steam inside the land; but it is very poetic when he describes the flora's survival.
The land is the part of the book that demonstrates how fascinated the author was while he was in that expedition. Each detail about the weather, the caatinga or the drought shows us how anxious the author was to let the people know about this region.

The Men

Euclides da Cunha said: "the backwoodsman is, before everything, a strong man" because of the place that the backwoodsman came from. They are survivals in a region where it is hard to live in. The backwoodsman is the image and similarity of the land that he steps on.
This second part of the book, the author improves the scientific aspect of his narrative to explain, using an old fashion knowledge, how the Brazilian ethnics were formed and about the races evolution.
He tells us where Antônio Conselheiro came from and explains how Canudos' war began. Euclides presents the backwoodsman as someone that has weakness in everything: lazy words, embarrassing gestures and ungainly walking. However he says that if something makes the backwoodsman exploit his energies, he becomes a strong man.

The fight

The third part of the book is longer than the other two. It describes characteristics with a novelist style and using anger words to talk about the canudos' defeat. The author made an account using the scenes seen by him.

Euclides understood that this war started because the government had fear that canudos' revolution got bigger. He understood that this massacre couldn't be forgotten.
Today, a hundred years after being launched, Os Sertões is an obligatory book to everyone who wants know deeply about this history that happen in our nation and think about other societies.

 

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