Sergeant Getulio     by Joâo Ubaldo Ribeiro, Translated by Author Original title: Sargento Getúlio Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Houghton Mifflin Company Pub. Date: 1977 Format: School & Library Bin, 146 pages ISBN: 0395257050 List Price: $7.95 Not available for ordering Published by Avon Pub. Date: January 1984 Format: Paperback, 144 pages ISBN: 0380670828 List Price: $2.95, £1.88 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £1.88 Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: £7.99 Not available for ordering Published by Houghton Mifflin: Boston Pub. Date: 1978 Pub. Place: USA Format: 146 pages Not available for ordering

Sergeant Getulio is a man with a mission — to escort a left-wing political prisoner across the wild, hostile backlands of Brazil’s North-East and deliver him, alive, to the coastal town of Aracaju, where he awaits his trial and probable execution. Whether or not Getulio completes this mission becomes a dramatic test of his own survival, as the personification of an entire culture of brutally machista individualism and uncompromising order. For he is beset by pressures that seem intent on undermining his purpose and raison d’être — the vacillations of the government, which announces half-way through the journey that the prisoner must be released, pursuing Getulio as a criminal deserter when he refuses to comply; the urge to anticipate the court’s judgement and execute his own sentence of justice on the man who comes to symbolise all his loathing and contempt for the values of the wider world; and the power of the desert itself, inspiring both love and hatred in Getulio, reminding him of his encroaching old age and mortality, with its twin options: voluntary retirement with a wife and family, or a sudden, violent death at the head of some apocalyptic army of latter-day bandits.

Sergeant Getulio stands in the best tradition of North-Eastern fiction — punctuated by Graciliano Ramos’s Barren Lives and Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands — in its exploration of the culture and mentality of the rural interior through the medium of its own oral language, at once primitive and severe, rich and lyrical. The only voice is that of Getulio’s rambling monologue, heard by his literally captive audience and by the few companions on his mission, living and dead. In this near seamless monologue he reveals the social, psychological and emotional anatomy of a people struggling to assert its identity as its traditional world is eroded and collapses about it. Like the excellent film based on it, this book poses an unforgettable challenge — to recognise a humanity in Getulio’s cruel rage, in his violent refusal to surrender to anonymity and oblivion.

All houses look like platefuls of food even if it is manioc flour mush. This Hudson, when it broke down for lack of gasoline, I gave it a good look and thought it was quite a monarch of a thing , because it necessitated the putting of gasoline in it by us and we used up all the cans and I wonder where the hell we are in this world. To tell the truth, I do know, but I see that walking is the thing that must be done and the junk opens his mouth and says that he cannot walk. And I say, yes, you can walk. Otherwise I will do the worst things to you, don’t get fresh. But I really wouldn’t do anything, with all this tiredness and even my jacket I took off because it weighed on me, I can barely carry my weapon and Amaro his, he actually likes it very much, he does everything short of kissing it, in fact I think he does, at night when no one is watching he gives it a few kisses. I know he polishes it with the cloth he got from the car. I stood looking at this car, which is new but has long become old, and I remained looking at it, all cold. It stood there, dead. Amaro still lifted the hood and looked inside, a heap of parts it had inside, all still; even Hudsons die. Then what is left for Amaro is the little two-barrelled thing, which he strokes and polishes and sniffs and when he leans it against something he pulls back and makes it stand on its butt and takes to gazing at it like a father gazes at a daughter. 93-94